Virtualization and Linux: Red Hat unveils new vision (IDG.no) [LWN.net]

IDG.no reports on Red Hat's latest virtualization software moves. "Three strategic virtualization initiatives were the stars of the show as Linux powerhouse Red Hat opened its Red Hat Summit Wednesday in Boston. What do the Red Hat moves mean to you? More options in open source virtualization tools and a new open source effort around virtualization security, for starters. The Red Hat move that will catch the eye of most users is the Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt. This is a lightweight, embeddable hypervisor that currently lets you run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows VMs (virtual machines) on Linux."

(Log in to post comments)

Virtualization and Linux: Red Hat unveils new vision (IDG.no)

Posted Jun 19, 2008 18:20 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

The author of the article is a bit confused.  oVirt isn't a virtualization technology based on
KVM... oVirt is a web-based management system for virtualization.  They make it sound like
oVirt is a fork of KVM or something.

Giving oVirt a try

Posted Jun 19, 2008 22:39 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Ok, just downloaded the ovirt machine image.  My new workstation at work just happens to be a
Dell Optiplex 755 with a Core 2 with VT and I'm running Fedora 9 x86_64 with working KVM.

I followed the instructions, installed the oVirt machines.  Started it up... and then started
up the three demo nodes.  Pretty neat setup.  It is taking a while to understand what I have
and what to do with it but so far as a preview of the technology, it is pretty interesting.

The three nodes that the manager node... errr... manages... those boot via PXE from the
management node.  As it stands oVirt's machine storage has to be over NFS or iSCSI.  They show
how to create iSCSI targets on Fedora 9 but recommend using something like openfiler... which
they might include as a machine image in the next release.

Did you get all of that?  I'm not sure I did but I'm still reading.

BTW, oVirt has been around for a while now and it wasn't just released during the Red Hat
Summit this week... but it was a good time to release a press release about it, eh?

Also, it is my understanding that the "Emerging Technology Project" at Red Hat was broken up
some time ago with each person going to work in different but related areas... and most of the
development activity is being hosted at fedorahosted.org.  That's what I understood Jesse
Keating to say at the Fedora Birds of a Feather at the Linuxfest Northwest 2008 show.