Red Hat started to challenge VMware: What is the new battlefield for virtualization management?

In the Red Hat program, VMware became another target for them. Red Hat, which has always been focusing on Linux, is constantly strengthening its virtualization management software so that it will take a favorable position in the future competition with VMware. In last November, two months after RHEL5.4 was released, RedHat released its RedHatEnterpriseVirtualizationforServers (REV) bare-metal hypervisor solution. Rev with built-in KVM Virtualization

In the Red Hat program, VMware became another target for them. Red Hat, which has always been focusing on Linux, is constantly strengthening its virtualization management software so that it will take a favorable position in the future competition with VMware.

In last November, two months after RHEL 5.4 was released, RedHat released its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization alization for Servers (REV) bare metal hypervisor solution. Rev with built-in KVM virtualization is composed of two components: one is the KVM-based hypervisor itself, which is basically a stripped RHEL kernel, and the other is rev Manager for Servers, A Windows Server 2003-based virtualization management system that provides administrators with control over virtual machines running on rev hypervisor or RHEL-with-KVM hosts and manages the hosts themselves.

VMware's many advantages in virtualization have created its powerful underlying management architecture. For advanced functions, the relatively immature rev Manager cannot be compared with VMware's management system. However, rev Manager does already have high availability, system scheduling, and storage management features, as well as a particularly important feature: Real-Time Migration (known as VMotion by VMware ).

The real-time migration function allows you to move a running Virtual Machine from one host to another in real time without any downtime. during migration, the Virtual Disk Files will reside on the shared storage media. Microsoft's Hyper-V was criticized for its lack of real-time migration, and Red Hat launched rev with this feature, which is not surprising.

The other two features of VMware are still lacking in Rev Manager, one of which is the real-time migration of Virtual Disk Files (VMware is called Storage VMotion ), another feature is the unified Backup feature (VMware Consolidated lidated Backup, VCB ). However, these two problems are already in the Red Hat program. "We do not have Storage VMotion yet, but it is already in the product blueprint. We cannot provide the same things as VCB, but this situation will change, "said Navin Thadani, senior director of Red Hat Virtualization business.

Speaking of the unified backup function of VCB, Thadani believes that it is not necessary at present, because most customers prefer to back up virtual machines in the same way as physical machines, for example, backup assistant software running on a virtual machine. However, these assistant software will consume a lot of physical machine Resources in the backup process. As the usage of virtual machines increases, RedHat users will begin to require more direct solutions. "We are talking about this with our partners. We will come up with the same features as VCB in the future. Then you can make a face-to-face comparison between us and VMware, "Thadani made a commitment.