Virtually Open Source

Virtualization technology delivers a quantum step in IT operational flexibility, speed of deployment, and application performance and availability. Virtualization allows IT managers to deliver more to their customers while gaining control of their costs. And new and exciting uses for virtualized environments are being developed every day.

For many customers, traditional virtualization products have failed to provide a complete solution that enables them to enjoy the benefits of a fully virtualized IT infrastructure. Some products provide server virtualization, while others provide storage virtualization. Integration is minimal, resulting in poor performance and complexity, management tools are inconsistent, and customers aren’t satisfied.

With Red Hat virtualization, processing and data resources - servers and storage - are logically grouped into a single resource pool. Virtual servers and storage can then be dynamically allocated, in just a few seconds, as business demands dictate.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Advanced Platform is the first complete open source solution that provides fully integrated, ready-to-go, commercial-strength, server and storage virtualization. It integrates server and storage virtualization technologies into a single, easily managed product, delivering a complete and highly functional environment. Virtualization that is easy to deploy and manage. Flexible and available, all of the capabilities an IT organization needs.

Primary benefits include:

• Server consolidation – with virtualization, it is possible to consolidate the load of several lightly loaded servers onto one.
• Hardware abstraction – virtualization makes it easy to deploy an older operating system and applications on new hardware.
• Resource management and high availability – The ability to move guest instances between systems enables workloads to be handled by the most appropriate system and continued operation during maintenance periods.
• Application isolation – With virtualization it is easy to encapsulate an application together with its operating system, performance, and configuration parameters, security environment, etc. into a single entity. This encapsulation enables applications to be tightly controlled and managed, immune from other changes in the IT environment.

Upgrades:
A common annoyance to system administrators is the major testing and qualification work required when a new version of a base operating system is introduced. The benefits from the new software may be very minor for the majority of applications, but may be required to accommodate one application or one new hardware option.
Virtualization provides an escape from this very problem. The existing stack can continue to run as is as a guest inside a virtual machine, while the latest hypervisor happily supports the new hardware, as well as bringing benefits in reliability and performance. The few applications that need the new version of the operating system can execute on another virtual machine with the latest version. This means that upgrades need only to be performed when system administrators want them. They will never again be forced into an unplanned and costly software upgrade.

Security:
While a system that is only used for one application can be locked up tightly, many systems today have shared access, and it is important to ensure that privacy is maintained.
Virtualization allows each application and data set to be placed in a separate virtual machine. This has many of the advantages of locking up each physical system, without the proliferation of hardware. Because virtualization isolates each guest, each guest is much less susceptible to undesired sharing. Any successful attack is limited to the one guest that is penetrated. Coupled with SELinux and Red Hat Identity Management, it is possible to achieve a high degree of user and data isolation without requiring separate servers for each user.

Developing and testing:
Software development requires a long cycle with many iterations of coding, debugging, and testing. In the past, the debugging and testing has often required many separate systems. It has been difficult to build up the larger networks and datasets needed for testing. Virtualization provides a number of solutions.
Developers can be given individual virtual machines that they are able to start and stop without impacting each other. No longer do developers need individual physical machines. This allows for much better debugging of code, including kernel code.

Because virtual machines can be easily and quickly started, stopped, and modified, it is possible to automate a large series of regression testing. Scripts can provision different versions of applications and operating systems, run known datasets against them, and plot and report the results. If a system dies, the script can detect this, as only the guest would have crashed.

When large collections of systems need to be used, multiple networked guests can be brought up and can simulate a large physical network with a small number of physical servers. This can allow scalability testing that is rarely done today. In fact, during the off hours, the extra cycles in unused production machines can also be used for testing in a safe manner because of the security and firewalling of each guest.