Red Hat and IBM made a big choice: full support for open source virtualization KVM

Today, organizations are deploying or implementing virtualization technologies to improve the utilization and economics of IT infrastructures. With Data center virtualization, these enterprises drive the high availability and rapid recovery of critical applications. In recent years, virtualization technologies such as VMware, Jie, and Microsoft have dominated most of the data center's territory. However, business solutions are not only expensive to deploy and operational, but are also easily locked by vendors. Enterprise users want to maintain control over it, ensure that the underlying virtual platform is open, and have a strong ecosystem to support it.

Red Hat and IBM made a big choice: full support for open source virtualization KVM. The KVM is built on Linux, essentially translating the Linux kernel into a bare-metal virtual machine hypervisor that runs the Linux operating system and the Microsoft Windows client operating system virtual machine management program. The KVM can use Linux to perform many operations, including character scheduling, management kernel, docking with hardware devices, with high performance, scalability and security features.

In the 90 's, IBM signed a partnership agreement with Red Hat to develop and support open source operating system Linux, which to some extent achieved the 1 billion U.S. dollars in the open source company Red Hat. Now that virtualization and cloud computing are more important than Linux itself, server virtualization is also moving toward open and standardized implementations.

To this end, Red Hat and IBM frequently shot, joint promotion of KVM technology. In May 2011, six companies such as Red Hat and IBM set up the Open Source Virtualization Alliance (Open vitrualization Alliance,ova) to drive the development of open source virtualization technology. At the end of the year, manufacturers such as Red Hat and IBM sponsored the Ovirt.org Open source community to develop open source KVM management and build ISV ecosystems. OVA and Ovirt respectively from the market and technical point of view, to build enterprise-ready open source KVM solution.

and Red Hat and IBM also fully combine their hardware and software advantages, spare no effort to promote KVM. All IBM hardware platforms (such as IBM Pure BAE, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and IBM BAE X) support red-cap KVM-built systems (such as Rhel 6.x), while IBM SmartCloud (also known as the IBM Yi Yun) solution also supports KVM to help customers build the IaaS cloud; In addition, Red Hat provides technicians and IBM to provide customers with the consulting and service work on cloud computing.

Recently, IBM has clearly announced that its cloud computing products will be based on OpenStack, the existing smartcloud will gradually migrate to OpenStack. This is after the KVM, another open source event. "The rise of the OpenStack, using Libvrit for abstraction, who will not care about the underlying virtual machine and the operating system is whose home." And Red Hat will continue to promote KVM. "Five years later, everyone is using an open source computing environment," said one person in the industry. There is only stack contention between vendors. ”

In the view of users, the first advantage of open source technology is the deployment and operation cost savings. China Merchants Bank New York branch requires employees to securely and efficiently access the two separate networks that are not in place, while minimizing IT management requirements and overhead. Reduce the number of New York branch architecture workstations by 50% and save 20% of software licensing and hardware costs by using the Intel Xeon Smart processor, IBM System x 3550 and 3650 servers running red Hat enterprice Linux with KVM technology , and improves storage performance.

Ease of use is also a major feature of KVM. The advantage of using KVM and VirtualBox on red hats and CentOS, according to one architect, is obvious: compiling jobs in Windows 2008 virtual machines with the same 2G of memory uses VS2008, compiles directly with NMAKE, The KVM compile time is less than 3/4 of the VirtualBox.

At present, Red Hat has been officially released Rhev 3.1, the new version in the extensibility, user management interface, network, storage and virtual desktop system features such as a great improvement. Rhev 3.1 is integrated with Red Hat products including Red Hat storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform to further enhance product flexibility.

IDC, a market research firm, points out that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (Rhev) based on open source project KVM and Ovirt is the rising power of the virtualization market. Red Hat's experience with Linux and other Open-source software makes it a leader in bringing KVM into the corporate marketplace. Extensive industry support and growing ecosystems show the growing growth of the Open Virtualization Alliance.

Linux has been thoroughly tempered for more than more than 10 years, the trust of millions of enterprises, and achieved great success. KVM relies on Linux to extend the benefits to the virtualization arena. The large investments of manufacturers such as Red Hat and IBM, the promotion of open virtualization alliances, the technical support of Open-source communities, and the actual benefits of users are the best annotations to the KVM boom.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)