Red Hat is jumping into the virtualization management field with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, a management system for IT shops that are virtualizing servers based on the KVM hypervisor built into Linux.

Red Hat is making a late entry into the virtualization market based on the addition of support for KVM or kernel virtual machine in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 released in September. The other shoe in Red Hat's "virtualization portfolio" has now dropped with the Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, or a centralized management system for KVM virtual machines.

Red Hat will also offer a stand-alone version of the KVM hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, a 100 megabyte version of Linux, or a drastically slimmed down version of RHEL 5.4, for server virtualization projects.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said the product set is aimed at giving enterprises the option of virtualizing large numbers of servers at a price point below today's market leaders. Those would include VMware, Citrix Systems and Microsoft.

Red Hat will offer the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers as a $499 per-year, per-socket subscription, including technical support, with no upfront licensing cost. Stevens said that price point is one-third to one-seventh of other vendors, including VMware and Microsoft.

The product set "dramatically lowers the bar for IT to deploy and manage virtualized environments based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform," said Stevens in a Red Hat Webcast broadcast Wednesday.

Navin Thadani, senior director of virtualization business, said Red Hat has run IBM's DB2 and SAP applications under Enterprise Linux in KVM machines and achieved performance levels that are "85% to 95% of bare metal performance." In the case of applications built to run with the open source LAMP stack, the results indicated the applications ran faster in KVM virtual machines than on bare metal, Thadani said.

The stand-alone version of the hypervisor is aimed at businesses that have not widely adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and may want an alternative with which to virtualize their servers. The hypervisor can run both KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V originated virtual machines.

The Enterprise Virtualization for Servers management system can also manage both KVM and Hyper-V virtual machines, Thadani said in the Webcast.

The announcement named Conviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm, and Swisscom as beta customers of Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. Their feedback that affected the final shape of the product, Thadani said.

One reason Red Hat is late coming to market is that it started out supporting open source Xen hypervisor virtualization in Enterprise Linux, and it still does. But it shifted its product set orientation toward KVM as it was added to the Linux kernel. KVM is described as a "lightweight" hypervisor because it uses the scheduler and memory manager of the kernel rather than duplicating them in a hypervisor.

Red Hat is working on a fourth virtualization product, Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, which is currently in beta and is expected to become generally available in the first quarter of 2010.

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