/training/etc News

It is difficult to have a technology conversation these days without getting into the topic of virtualization. As it has matured over the years these conversations have moved from, "Will virtualization benefit us?" to "How can we easily and cheaply implement virtualization?" As virtualization gained popularity Red Hat responded to customers by bundling a third party product, Xen, into its distribution. While a good solution, the community felt the need for native virtualization support.

At this past September's Red Hat Summit, Red Hat introduced support for Kernel Virtual Machines (KVM), the Linux native solution to virtualization. With KVM, comes a suite of tools, including Libvirt, that make virtualization easy by allowing organizations to leverage existing Linux expertise instead of spending time and money learning new platforms.

Libvirt is a set of libraries and management utilities which provide a consistent interface by abstracting the underlying virtualization technologies. Libvirt includes a daemon, graphic console viewer, command line utility, graphic manager interface as well as others to create and manage virtual storage, networks, and virtual machine hardware. A benefit of these new tools is that they can be used for Xen virtual servers and guests, as well as KVM. Work is under way to integrate VirtualBox, VMWare, and other popular virtualization technologies into the suite.

As consultants, we use virtualization nearly every day. Developing proof-of-concepts for new clients on my Fedora laptop provides me with a sandbox environment, where I can quickly develop and test new solutions. This saves time that might otherwise be spent waiting for the client to find hardware or grant me access to their lab/development environment. I can then demo this to my clients in a near production configuration which gives me confidence that the solution won't suffer due to huge architecture changes when it is delivered.

Ivan Makfinsky, RHCDS, has been working with Unix/Linux and Red Hat software for the past 11 years. Currently, he teaches the RHCE and RHCA track courses and also works as an independent consultant.

Aaron Forster, has been a Unix systems administrator for the past ten years, working on Unixes across the board. Recently, he has been focusing on helping organizations migrate disparate legacy systems to standardized manageable configurations.