Red Hat announces "next-generation" virtualization based on KVM

Today, at the Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced three virtualization initiatives including oVirt. The press release is here.

Some choice quotage:

KVM technology has rapidly emerged as the next-generation virtualization technology, following on from the highly successful Xen implementation.

Another good one:

We continue to see huge improvements in functionality, performance and time to market because of our close relationship with our open source partners. For example, Intel and IBM have worked with us for many years covering virtualization technologies that span from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to today's KVM-based announcements.

And of course:

"IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel," said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. "IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility."

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, check out KVM.

KVM and Green Computing

A ran across this article today from Tom Henderson that draws attention to the fact that most existing hypervisors (ESX, Xen, Hyper-V) do not support frequency scaling and therefore are not very eco-friendly.

This is partly true. There has been some recent work in Xen to add deep sleep state support and I believe even some work on frequency scaling. It is certainly not true though that virtualization and power-consciousness are at odds with each other. KVM is able to leverage all of the work that's been invested into Linux to manage power wisely. Good power management does not cause any sort of performance drop. Reducing the performance of your workload is only going to make the machine run longer and consume more power.

The reason most hypervisors don't support power management is that it's very hard. When inventing a new Operating System, there's a lot of things you have to focus on before you can even start looking at power management. Again, we see the benefits of using an existing Operating System for virtualization.