* Navin started out by stating that there are 4 main tools around redhat enterprise virtualization. These are (1) Virtualization manager for servers (2) virtualization manager for desktops (3) standalone kvm and (4) RHEL5.4 with kvm. Number 3 and 4 are the two flavors of the kvm hypervisor.
* Only RHEL5.4 with kvm is available now. The others will be available later this year.
* Redhat will support ISV software certified on RHEL whether it’s running on bare metal or running on the RHEL kvm or standalone kvm since it’s the same codebase. A specific question was raised about Oracle and their issue with supporting their software on hypervisors other than oracle VM. Response was that they are working with vendors and that all hypervisors will face this issue as it’s more of an issue with the Vendor. I agree with this response.
* RHEV standalone kvm has a very small footprint of < 100mb in size which makes it easy to do things like pxe boot it.
* Hosts can scale host to 96 cores and 1Tb ram. Should scale more but this is what has been tested.
* Guests can scale up to 16vcpus and 256GB ram.
* Paravirtual network and block drivers available for linux and windows. Supported Linux guests includes RHEL 3,4,5. Supported Windows drivers available for windows xp, 2003 and 2008.
* Security is another focus and a lot of security features are inherited from kernel. Example is selinux.
* NUMA, power management, memory page sharing (ksm) are some other important features. KSM important for density, very important and will be in product from day 1.
* Features high throughput, low latency.
* He gave an example of the effect of KSM (kernel shared memory). Light workload vms on a 48 core machine, 256 GB ram could run more than 600 vms.
* Features high throughput ie. > 1mil messages per second .
* Application performance. Testing results from internal and customers showed SAP workloads: 85-95, Oracle OLTP: 80-92% bare metal. LAMP stack showed better than bare metal performance. Whitepapers will be published in how this was achieved. Java achieved up to 94% bare metal.
* The management tools will be released in later half of 2009. Currently In beta with some customers. Designed to provide centralized management for your hosts in a datacenter environment. Tools allow you to define systems in the following heierarchy: virtual datacenters, clusters, hosts and virtual machines. Supports high availability by allowing VMs to automatically restart on other host when host having problems. Supports system scheduler at cluster level, live migration and power saver mode. There’s a maintenance manager that will automatically live migrate vms off servers during scheduled maintenance. Also includes monitoring and reporting tools.
* New management tools support image management including templates and thin provisioning.
* One of the best features of new tools is the ability to search large number of VMs for drilling down as opposed to hierarchical tree structure as done with other hypervisor products. Built this way for high scalability.
* Roadmap for RHEL6 was then presented. Will include virtual machine/physical machine (aka vm/pm ) scheduler. Can run applications side by side with virtual machines on same physical server due to fact that vms are just processes in kvm. The scheduler policy framewor can be based on time or load etc.
* RHEL6 Roadmap: Svirt. Allows selinux type policies to be applied to virtualization.
* RHEL6 Roadmap: SLA manager. As virtualization touch mission critical applications, this will provide deterministic performance for cpu, memory and storage resources. This is related to work being done in cgroups and CFS scheduler and will impact SLA monitoring and QoS for VMs.
* RHEL6 Roadmap: Integration with MRG scheduler. Integration with internal and external clouds.
* Packaging. Pricing not announced yet. Redhat will offer a RHEV bundle which will include manager for servers and the kvm hypervisor. Premium and standard subscription will be available. If you want to RHEL5.4 as a host you’ll have to buy that separately as opposed to using RHEL5.4 as a guest.
