IBM And Red Hat Talk Up KVM, Linux And Cloud

KVM Highlights

• IBM endorses Red Hat Linux in Cloud Computing services
• Red Hat owns the company developing the KVM hypervisor
• Red Hat incorporates KVM and Linux in RHEV
• The are helping a large hotel chain move from Xen to KVM
• The challenge for KVM is to become as widely adopted as VMWare

In a recent teleconference IBM’s Jean Staten Healy and Maria Azua were joined by Andrew Cathrow (Red Hat) and a representative from a large hotel chain to discuss the role of Linux and KVM. We thought it would be interesting to try to put these announcements in context with the development of the Open Source movement, who’s survival is challenged by the increasing levels of integration.
IBM has been a long-term supporter of the Linux operating system on all of its server platforms: it gives its mainframe users cheaper processing for non-transactional workloads and its x86 customers an alternative to Windows – at least for more specialised database or industry specific applications. Over the years IBM has formed partnerships with the leading distributions, resisting the urge to launch its own (unlike Oracle). It developed a strong early relationship with SuSe before its acquisition by Novell, as it has with Red Hat, which undoubtedly the leading Linux vendor today. Red Hat launched RHEL 6 in November 2010 and has been deeply involved with the development of KVM since its acquisition of its founder Qumranet back in 2008.

IBM Offers Linux For Infrastructure Workloads

Linux offers IBM customers a number of benefits. In particular:

• It helps optimise the data centre, is at the heart of virtualisation and consolidation activities, is fundamental to building ‘open’ cloud computing and is seen as the catalyst for IBM’s Smarter planet initiatives
• RHEL appears as one of 3 base operating systems in its newly introduced ‘Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud’ Cloud Computing offering and it has already incorporated upgrades to KVM in this pay-as-you-go service

Red Hat Promotes The Security, Performance And Scalability Benefits Of KVM And RHEV

Red Hat offerings include Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation which is a combination of Linux, KVM and management software. Andrew spoke about the new SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark, which demonstrates the performance and scalability of its products. He also claimed that KVM inherits the security features of Linux: in particular through its support of SELinux and through the developments of the sVirt project. In addition to IBM, customers of RHEV include NTT, Oxilon, Euronet, etisalat, Qualcomm and Dream Works.

A Major Customer Moves From Xen To KVM

One of Red Hat’s major customers is a large hotel chain using RHEL 5 on 2.5k IBM System X servers running its Property Management System in North America as well as on the 300 related servers in its data centre.
It was an early adopter of Xen, but planned to improve the ‘long term capability and performance of virtualization’ in its data centres. As a result it became ran an early proof of concept with Red Hat KVM in the second half of 2009.
It suggested that there were two important reasons for users to move from Xen to KVM. In particular:

• KVM is part of the Linux kernel, which simplifies the architecture
• Red Hat will ‘end of life’ Xen in 2014, when its normal support phase for RHEL 5 ends

It now claims to have virtualised 70% of the Linux servers in the data centre, adding the test environments in the second half of 2010. This year they are planning to implement a RHEV clustered solution in their production environment.

How Does KVM Stack Up Against VMWare, Microsoft and Xen?

We agree with the presenters that hypervisors are key components of modern data centre development, so we thought we’d look at how KVM stacks up against its competitors.
Hypervisors are programmes enabling virtual servers and PCs to run atop physical computers. Virtualisation as a topic is usually linked to the rise of VMWare at the beginning of the last decade, although its origins were with IBM 30 years before. KVM’s competitors include:

• VMWare ESX – the most widely used for server virtualisation on x86 hardware: VMWare is owned by EMC and has been active in extending its business to desktops and systems management
• Microsoft Hyper-V – Microsoft was slow to develop its own hypervisor, despite the rapid rise of VMWare
• Xen – an Open Source hypervisor used by many users and vendors for large scale deployments, including its Cloud Platform Initiative
• Those built in to all mainframe and Unix operating systems, such as IBM OS390, AIX and i5OS, HP’s HP-UX and NSK, Oracle’s Solaris

As Open Source software the basic use of KVM is free and has been included in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20 launched in February 2007, although Red Hat of course extends its value through service and integration into its commercial offerings. KVM will only run natively on processors with Intel VT-x or AMD-V extension instructions, although it has been ported to IBM S/390 and PowerPC and Intel IA64 processors. Although Xen can run on a wider selection of machines through Paravirtualisation software, KVM uses less code and is simpler to deploy, according to its developers. KVM guest operating systems include Linux, BSD Unix and Windows, although its host currently has to be Linux (the WinKVM version is currently being developed by Kazushi Takahashi).
We compare the benefits of the four open hypervisors in Figure 1. Taking into account the number of host operating systems, processors, market share and a comparison of their total cost of ownership, we believe VMWare currently has the most going for it, followed by Xen: Microsoft’s and KVM’s lack of adoption hold them back.

Some Conclusions – Linux Is No Longer A Philosophy

The early days of the Open Source movement were like a revolution: it seemed as if users were throwing of the oppressive bonds of the suppliers by pooling resources and building sophisticated software. Their code was important because it was designed to create standards, sidestepped lock-in and allowed developers to become stars in their newly formed communities. Over the years the emphasis shifted from users to suppliers (the best software developers were bought up) – its value was make the most of development money and help our industry avoid the ‘Betamax v VHS’ problems of the video recorder market.
The recession has changed things again – the small businesses responsible for the commercial exploitation of Open Source products and services are now mostly small departments in big, vertically integrated suppliers. On the positive side great efforts continue to be spent on creating great products like KVM. In addition the free use of existing Open Source software is protected by GPLs. However we believe that the model of giving software away in order to make money on support contracts later (perhaps best demonstrated by Sun in the last 2 years before selling out to Oracle) is a thing of the past.
IBM is old-fashioned by not introducing its own Linux distribution – if it did so it could deliver the greatest hypervisors imaginable. Red Hat is old-fashioned by continuing to develop community products such as Linux and KVM before enhancing them in its own commercial portfolio. On the positive side this gives the Community a much greater influence on their developments than they do with Oracle or VMWare.
Do you use hypervisors? Which one did you pick and why? As always please let us know by commenting on this post.

ITCandor Acronym Buster

GPL – General Public Licence
KVM – Kernel-based Virtual machine (in this case not ‘keyboard Video Mouse’)
RHEL – Red Hat Enterprise Linux
RHEV – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization