Red Hat takes on virtualisation

Red Hat has unveiled a new initiative to incorporate virtualisation technology into its Linux distribution. 

The company plans to release a new version of Fedora 5 in the coming weeks, which is a free Linux distribution that Red Hat uses for testing purposes.

A beta of the enterprise grade Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is scheduled for release this summer, and the final product is promised for late 2006.

The virtualisation technology is built around the Xen open source Hypervisor virtualisation software developed at the University of Cambridge with support from Intel. 

"This will be the first time that we start to create a real community of users around integrated virtualisation technology," said Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at Red Hat, at a launch event in San Francisco.

"Right now the struggle with virtualisation, and especially with open source virtualisation and its newness, is that a lot of time is left by the end users to just tie everything together. With Fedora Core 5 we are going to take the rocket science away from the end user of virtualisation."

The software will support Intel's Virtualisation Technology and AMD's Pacifica virtualisation technologies which both manufacturers have integrated into their processors.

Virtualisation technology allows for server consolidation and an increase in server utilisation. The technology lets enterprises run several operating systems on a single physical server with each operating system acting like it is running on a dedicated server.

Red Hat predicts that virtualisation will allow enterprises to boost their server utilisation rates from the current 20 per cent to about 80 per cent.