Red Hat believes the next technology that will alter the face of computing is integrated virtualization. Red Hat introduced integrated virtualization in March 2007 with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5, the first product to deliver commercial quality open source virtualization. Red Hat's solutions focus on delivery of complete, mature systems that are ready for mission-critical environments.
Virtualization technology delivers a quantum leap in IT operational flexibility, speed of deployment, and application performance and availability. Virtualization enables IT managers to deliver more to their customers while gaining more control over their costs. Plus, new and exciting uses for virtualized environments are being developed every day.
Virtualization enables customers to run multiple operating system "instances" or “guests” on a single physical system. It isolates the complete operating system and application stack from the hardware, increasing operational flexibility and improving resource utilization. With Red Hat virtualization, processing and data resources-servers and storage-are logically grouped into a single resource pool. Virtual servers and storage can then be dynamically allocated in just a few seconds, as business demands dictate.
Red Hat is a major contributor to open source virtualization projects (including Xen and KVM) and provides a hypervisor that is fully integrated into the Linux kernel. The hypervisor alone does not yield a useful result; it is the integration into the Linux kernel that provides a powerful, usable solution.
In addition to pure server virtualization, successful deployments of virtualized IT environments require a common view of storage and comprehensive virtual machine management. An effective virtualization platform requires integration of all these components. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform is the product that provides all these components in a single, easy-to-use package.
Advantages of Red Hat Virtualization:
- Server consolidation - Consolidate several lightly loaded servers into one.
- Hardware abstraction - Deploying an older operating system and applications on new hardware is easy.
- Resource Management and High Availability - Move guest instances between systems. Give workloads to the most appropriate system. Have continued operation during maintenance periods. A consistent virtualized server environment makes the deployment of disaster-tolerant configurations simpler, practical, and trustworthy.
- Application Isolation - Encapsulate an application and its operating system, performance, and configuration parameters, and security environment. Tightly control and manage your applications, and protect them from other changes in the IT environment.
