KVM Aims for King of the Virtual Hill Status
Red Hat's KVM virtualization technology is so advanced that it will inevitably consign the Xen hypervisor to the technological scrap heap.
That's the view of Navin Thadani, a senior director of the Linux vendor's virtualization business. "We see consolidation as being inevitable, and in the medium term in this market we believe that will leave VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat," he said.
Red Hat got its hands on KVM — which works in conjunction with Intel and AMD chips with hardware virtualization support — when it acquired Qumranet, an Israel-based company, in September 2008. While the company continues to support Xen for its existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 customers, it is being positioned very much as a legacy virtualization solution. "We believe KVM represents the next generation of virtualization," said Thadani. "KVM offers significant benefits over Xen and proprietary systems and is the strategic direction we want to go, so we will encourage our customers to start to migrate to KVM when they are ready to, and provide the tools and services needed to help them do so."
So what's so great about KVM that has caused Red Hat to prepare to abandon Xen? Most of the attraction stems from the fact that KVM is part of the Linux kernel, rather than being a separate kernel, as is the case with Xen. That means all the benefits of the thousands of hours of work done on the Linux kernel — including scalability, robustness, security, memory management, NUMA, and the vast hardware ecosystem supported — also accrue to the KVM hypervisor automatically, rather than needing to be done again. As a result, KVM can immediately support up to 96 cores and a terabyte of RAM at the host level. (Individual guest OSes can have up to 16 virtual CPUs.)
Read more...http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3843966/KVM-Aims-for-King-of-the-Virtual-Hill-Status.htm
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