Red Hat eyes virtualization

Paul Mah — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:22:14 -0400

The Red Hat summit in Boston last week saw Red Hat open a beta of its Linux-based oVirt hypervisor that weights in at less than 64MB. oVirt is based on the KVM, or kernel-based virtual machine, and supports both Linux and Microsoft's Windows operating systems as hosts. In addition, it also supports live migration to allow applications running on one virtual machine to be seamlessly migrated to other virtual machines without any downtime. Live migration can be done even if the target is on a separate physical server.

Overall, observers present at the Summit were impressed by Red Hat's virtualization strategy, which also involves building management tools that will eventually allow thousands of virtual machines to be created and managed on Red Hat's platform.

For more on Red Hat's virtualization strategy:
- check out this NetworkWorld article

Sanbolic brings shared file access to virtual machines

Paul Mah — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:12:23 -0400

SAN vendor Sanbolic, better known for its Melio clustered file system that allows Windows servers shared access to files, has extended its technology to VMware virtual machines. Called the Melio Clustered File System Application Data Solution for VMware ESX, the software makes it possible for concurrent application access of the same data by separate servers. While the enterprise-positioned VMware ESX hypervisor stores virtual machines on a shared SAN volume, it works only on a virtual machine level. In the event of a failure, no other server will be able to access the data immediately. Sanbolic's software makes it possible. Gartner's Paquet noted out that Sanbolic's technology could be rendered unnecessary should VMware choose to bundle it by default into its virtualization engine.

For more about Sanbolic:
- check out this Network World article

Virtual Machine

Red Hat eyes virtualization

Sanbolic brings shared file access to virtual machines