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Red Hat Pledges 'Integrated Virtualization'
OSS_ilation writes "Red Hat was all about virtualization in a recent announcement for an 'integrated virtualization' initiative with XenSource and chipmakers AMD and Intel. The move was seen as a way for Red Hat to bring its commitment to virtualization technology into 'sharper focus [...] with the release of a product roadmap that includes virtualization technology built into its enterprise version of Linux.' Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, said the move would remove the complex 'rocket science' aspect of virtualization, and drive the technology into more enterprises as a result."
Wasn't virtualization supposed to go into the kernel at some point? I was under the impression it got delayed for some reason. Anyone know the status of it? Is the virtualization in the kernel what Red Hat are going to use to provide this?
No matter what the haters say, Red Hat is one of the main distributions I go to when building a new server (CentOS if no support needed). Things like integrated SELinux, easy to use yum (or rpm apt-get), and now virtualization make it very impressive.
The more you know, the less you understand.
Recently I switched my laptop to Tomahawk Desktop because of its impressive array of features for mobile computing.
It seems now Red Hat is not focusing much on desktop and laptops. I wonder whether the desktop and laptop arena not lucrative or is there really something else?
Either people have actually begun reading the articles thorougly before posting, nobody is interested in technology on this site anymore... opting for politics.
maybe this means I can finally toss out the old MS OS... Lack of developement software support is my only reason for staying, despite the gaggins sensation i get everytime i have to boot windows :(
haha
"What happend to just paying for a product without being constantly nibbled to death by Credit Card Ducks?"
I'm sorry, obviously I don't need it, because I don't have a clue what it is. What is this "virtualization"? Linky, please?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Except can hope for death. From TFA:
"With Fedora Core 5, we will take the rocket science of virtualization away from the end user and get virtualization out-of-the-box experience in their hands," Stevens said.
Where it will promptly mutate in to a flesh eating form of virus, obliterating you, your family and your dog.
A word to the wise; Stay away from fedora cores. If you must use one, choose one that's been out for a while. Trust me; You'll be glad you did.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
From what I gathered from the article, it looks like Red Hat is porting their distro to the Xen virtual machines and then packaging that with the natively-compiled OS as a virtual machine manager. It's nice to see a distro pick up Xen officially and package it an easy-to-use way, since Xen has very impressive performance. The article or the summary probably should have included a link to the Xen web site, so if you want to know more: the Xen site.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
I'm wondering if they aren't just going to Include Xen, this would explain the sudden push on Xen's part to get a working FC4 installer out the door.
:) Either way you go this is going to be a good thing.
.. people are going to need help with this for years to come. I think it will help us do what we like doing (plan networks) instead of worrying so much about the semantics of getting (x software) installed and working. This means easier work, quicker turnover and more clients.
/dev/shm allowing execution, and other (seemingly) little quirks that allow so much spam to wind its way throughout the internet. They're catching up, it seems with just how people are using their product, hosting web sites (broadly). I hope they also make it safer in the process so that whatever layer they use for virtualization doesn't also get a rep for being insecure.
I'm not the world's biggest RH fan as far as using it, however I do respect that RH basically made Linux the household word that it is.
The end result, regardless of the politics is going to be web sites and databases remaining available to visitors a larger percent of the time, and end users getting a firmer grasp on how their OS works
For consultants specializing in helping to bring virtualization to the table for their clients, fear not
My concern is RH distributes (stock) very insecurely. My hope is they also address issues like
I'm not a huge Fedora fan, but I do respect them enough to withold judgement until I see what they put out. I guess you could count me as 'cautious, but anxious' to see it.
This is great news. I'm currently involved in a rollout of Red Hat Enterprise for a large Govt Department in Western Australia and we have had to make extensive use of VMWare's ESX. Having Xen in RH would streamline our development process and make a Red Hat ES development environment more attractive for large enterprise use.
I'm currently using Virtuozzo (based on OpenVZ) for my website (in my sig) on top of Red Hat...works great. If Red Hat integrated Xen into their OS, that would be even more convienent for webmasters like me :)
Student Research and Development
I wonder if this virtualization removes the dependency hell from their package manager. This Virtual Integration might mean that you can finally use RPM without all that fuss. Then you could actually integrate your RH machine into a business environment without all the pain.
A couple of months ago I was faced with the problem of needing to host multiple domains on one system. I initially considered Xen for my virtual servers need. However when I learned that this solution would not share the memory (each Vserver would have to have its dedicated memory) I decided to try out Linux Vserver. I have been a happy user of Linux Vserver since then.
With Linux Vserver you only run one kernel on your system where with Xen each virtual server runs its own kernel. This presents some limitations for Linux Vserver. For example the guest virtual servers cannot have the network loopback interface lo. But almost all of these I could live without.
Now if I want to start adding more virtual servers I can, without having to worry about running out of memory.
if someone sais `virtualization` one more time i will virtually throw up. virtually.
On the wiki xen site it says,"Xen trades full OS binary compatibility for comparative simplicity and improved performance"
Anyone know which part of the full OS binary compatibility was traded?
You haven't explained how virtualization avoids RPM hell.
Only the technology is named User Mode Linux (UML) instead of Xen. Xen still requires you to jump trough quite a number of hoops before you have a virtual machine running. With UML it is so simple you can start, stop & create new ones on demand like is done at linuxzoo.net
With xen you need a modified host kernel and do some tricky stuff with LVM to use Copy on write disks. With lvm it is the default, you can just point to a base image and have the users modifications in a separate file. The downside is the speed penalty: UML is 40-50% slower than Xen.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Be very careful! I've been looking into building a computer specifically for playing with Xen, what I have found out is while the Intel product doc's say VT enabled chip, it isn't actually turned on yet...
_ enables_xeon_vt/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/02/08/intel
As far as I can tell AMD hasn't released their pacifica chips yet.
"An Introduction to Xen - a virtual machine monitor for x86 compatibles"
Given at the Hampshire (England) LUG AGM last year.
Xen works with any OS as long as either the kernel has been modified to fit virtualization, or the processor has extensions that support it directly. So either way, Xen allow just any old system, though it isn't tied to a particular platform.
Just a word of caution though: Xen is "new technology," which basically means it isn't the most stable product right now, especially given its level of technical sophistication. Similarly, the new processors from AMD and Intel are, well, new; they will require some time in the market before they are used adequately.
All in all though, the technology is pretty exciting. Some researchers I work with are looking into using Xen on SMPs with multiple Ethernet ports. Since vanilla Ethernet requires the kernel for TCP, multiprocessors tend to have trouble adequately using the multiple communication links. With virtualization though, there can be one instance of the OS per processor, which means one TCP stack per processor, which means one Ethernet port per processor.
Even with hardware virtualization support, a modified guest kernel with paravirtualization support should see a performance gain over a native, unmodified kernel. The goal is that both methods would be faster than traditional, software-based virtualization or emulation techniques, however.
With modified kernels readily available, you're likely to see them for FSF Free Software platforms (GNU/Linux, BSD, etc.), for quite some time.
There's also a project to port Xen to OpenSolaris.
Breakfast served all day!
I have been thinking that it would be interesting to have virtualized operating systems running over a distributed system. All the resources of the distributed system could then be shared amongst the hosted OSs. You could move resources from one hosted OS to another as needed. If things are too slow, just add another system in the distributed system and its resources help the hosted systems.
-Ack
-- soldack
What VMM should I be looking at, vmware, Xen, or something else?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
I thought at first you wanted full-system emulation, so that's why I mentioned QEMU. If you specifically want "only Office" and not a full Windows session, there's Wine (winehq.com). Office runs integrated in the Linux desktop then. Compatibility varies from version to version, but tends to get progressively better. Personally, I only tried Wine with Word Viewer (the free download from microsoft.com) and that was many years ago; on my non-thorough tests it worked perfectly even back then.
There's a company who sells a proprietary extension of Wine called 'Crossover Office' which specifically adds tweaks to improve Office compatibility in Wine -- I know a few satisfied users.
The filesystem is the package manager