Red Hat announces Xen-free virtualisation road map

Red Hat has announced its roadmap for virtualisation and its KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) all the way, as Xen virtualisation is parked up. The Red Hat announcement makes it clear that the company plans to capitalise on its September 2008 acquisition of Qumranet, the KVM developers. Red Hat will continue to support existing deployments of Xen based installations, but will look to migrate customers to new KVM based offerings.

Red Hat also promise a new open source virtualisation manager, "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Manager For Servers", to handle migration, availability and provisioning. For desktops, a similar virtualisation manager, based around the Qumranet SolidICE and SPICE protocol is promised. The final element of Red Hat's strategy is the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Hypervisor, a standalone hypervisor, which appears to be the foundation for the other offerings.

The virtualisation products will be delivered over the next eighteen months, with the first elements expected by the summer of 2009.

In an unrelated move, Citrix, owners of XenSource, announced today that they would be making a version of XenServer a free, but not open source, product for all sizes of customer. XenServer/Essentials provides a virtualisation management environment based around Xen virtual machines.

(djwm)