Red Hat is planning to build virtual machine management into the Linux operating system and has launched an Open Virtualization project to develop management features for enterprise virtual machine environments.

Red Hat made the announcements at its fourth annual user group meeting, the Red Hat Summit, in Boston this week.

Such a move could spur the use of Linux as the operating system of choice in virtual machine environments. Linux might gain an edge as the operating system contained in a virtual machine, a position currently dominated by Windows, and it could also serve as the supplier of the hypervisor to host multiple virtual machines on a server. A future version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will have a hypervisor built into the kernel, surrounded by management tools.

In addition, Red Hat is expanding the ability of enterprises to add Linux users and servers in general without proportionately expanding the ranks of Linux administrators. One step in that direction is the addition of a large-scale user product, Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy, and Audit, to its portfolio.

Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies and the Linux distributor's former executive VP of engineering, said Red Hat will supply a built-in hypervisor, based on Kernel Virtual Machine, or KVM, and provide tools to generate and manage thousands of virtual machines at a time. KVM was placed in the kernel by Linus Torvalds and the kernel development process at the end of 2006, but it's still considered in its early adoption phase, ready for test by users, and appears in such distributions as Red Hat Fedora, not Red Hat's current Enterprise Linux 5.

Through an open source project launched today, oVirt.org for open virtualization management, Red Hat hopes to collect ideas and code contributions to build out Linux-based virtual machine management. The oVirt.org project has already produced a Web-based management console where administrators will be able to remotely generate, manage, and decommission virtual machines. Red Hat has come up with an API that can allow an administrator to connect to a remote virtual machine built from either KVM or Xen. It provided a toolkit for building applications that work with the API, libvirt, and management tools that monitor, apply policies, and invoke security measures are expected to follow.