Red Hat Offers Hypervisor

By Alex Handy

June 23, 2008 —  The folks at Red Hat spent last week in the town of Paul Revere. At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, the company revealed oVirt, a new hypervisor for virtualization, and Spacewalk, an open-source equivalent to the company's Red Hat Network Satellite management platform.

oVirt is based on KVM — kernel virtual machine — and allows not only for the virtualization of servers, but the monitoring of those servers as well. oVirt includes automated cluster design and maintenance for virtual machines, as well as load balancing and deployment. oVirt also sets itself apart from Xen and VMware by being slim; the hypervisor can fit into double-digit megabytes of RAM. The included Web management console can also be used to maintain real servers, not just virtual ones. oVirt is open source and available freely though it is currently in beta form. More information is online at www.ovirt.org.

The Red Hat Network Satellite management platform has also gone open source and is now available as Spacewalk. The platform allows administrators to control and manage instances of Red Hat-like Linuxes. Spacewalk is available under the GPLv2 and includes scheduling and permission controls to keep installed systems from running amok on patch day.

Red Hat also announced that it has purchased the software assets of Identyx, an identity and security company. The fruits of that acquisition are appearing as Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy and Audit, or IPA. That package includes identity management tools to allow single sign-on and directory services for users, alongside a secure and reliable infrastructure of trust. IPA can coordinate identity information with LDAP and ActiveDirectory, so Linux users won't be closing themselves off from the real world.



Related Search Term(s): Desktop management, Linux, security, servers & blades, virtualization, Red Hat

Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32419