Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 on IBM System x a Smarter Choice Virtualization and cloud computing are compelling technologies that are driving the future of computing. By transitioning workloads from physical servers to virtual machines, datacenter consolidation significantly increases the utilization and agility of computing resources while reducing operating costs with more efficient use of power and space. Capital cost savings in server hardware is the most immediate benefit and can range from a reduction of 40 75%. Datacenter operations also benefit from the improved on-going management of servers as wellas reduced requirements for space and power. Virtual machines can be provisioned much more rapidly than physical servers. High availability and rapid recovery can easily be built into the solution much more cheaply than with physical servers (offering cost savings for ongoing business continuity). Through resource scheduling and policy-driven workload balancing, optimization of the entire virtual infrastructure can be more effectively maintained. At the same time, virtualization solutions must deliver enterprise-level functionality and capabilities in terms of performance, scalability, security, and manage-ability in order to be viable. Based on a long and successful collaboration, Red Hat and IBM are poised to offer organizations unparalleled virtualization opportunities through the unique combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 and IBM System x and PureSystems servers. IBM and Red Hat: A Strong History of Innovation and Collaboration It would be a challenge to find an organization with a longer and greater depth of virtualization experience than IBM. With a history of virtualization innovation extending back into the 1960s, IBM is in a unique position to add value to open virtualization solutions. As shown in Figure 1, IBM and Red Hat have a strong and long-standing tradition of industry-leading collaboration around Linux, and around virtualization technology in particular.
This close collaboration enables IBM to leverage new capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 earlier with IBM System x hardware. IBM System x is specifically optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM s ex5 server innovations provide breakthrough virtualization agility. MAX5 memory allows organizations to scale memory capacity up to five times that of non-ex5 servers. Memory can now be scaled independently from CPUs to get more out of business-critical, enterprise solutions such as business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, and databases. Input/output (I/O) capacity is also superior with four times the I/O ports of traditional systems equipped with 10 Gigabit Ethernet. IBM s PureSystems offers integrated fabric-based computing with a choice of compute, storage, and networking components built around a high speed fabric. Virtual disks can be moved between different storage components, and new storage and networking components can be hot-plugged. Lining up Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 s advanced features such as live storage migration, disk and network hot-plug, and live snapshots of virtual machine images with IBM PureSystems delivers an agile, intregrated infrastructure that is up to 66% faster to setup and delivers up to 200% increased performance on critical applications. Figure 1. IBM has a long and unassailable record of innovation in virtualization technology, dating back into the 1960s. The collaboration between IBM and Red Hat brings the following advantages to enterprises: Lower total cost of ownership Enterprise-class performance, scalability, and security Technical leadership and business agility through the open source development community A lower-cost, more scalable and open cloud An ecosystem of virtualization management tools and ISV applications 2
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 As adoption of virtualization technology grows, it is following a now-familiar path. Once the only option, early proprietary solutions are gradually giving way to open standards and open source technologies. Just as open source Linux solutions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux have rapidly replaced proprietary UNIX systems, open source hypervisor technology now competes directly with proprietary virtualization technologies. The payoff is predictable in terms of reduced costs and eliminated vendor lock-in. The introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 in particular positions the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor as a strategic alternative. Unlike proprietary virtualization technologies that restrict organizations to proprietary virtualization and cloud stacks, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 offers a superior balance of enterprise virtualization management features, performance, and scalability for Linux and Windows workloads at a fraction of the cost. Because Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is based on the open source KVM hypervisor, it offers an open, interoperable solution from Red Hat, a trusted enterprise vendor, without the lock-in of proprietary hypervisor solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is a complete virtualization management solution for server and desktop virtualization, and it is the first enterprise-ready, fully open source virtualization platform. It is based on the powerful KVM hypervisor and the ovirt open source virtualization management project. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization represents a true strategic virtualization alternative for organizations looking for better total cost of ownership (TCO), faster return on investment (ROI), and accelerated ROI when compared to proprietary virtualization vendors. An enterprise-ready offering ideal for large-scale virtualization and internal cloud deployments With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM hardware, we have been able to reduce costs significantly while also speeding up procurement, which has helped the company successfully handle business management challenges. Atsushi Yazawa, deputy senior general manager, Production & Purchasing Division at Casio Virtualization provides the foundation for a gradual transition to the cloud, and Red Hat s KVM hypervisor integrates virtualization directly into the Linux kernel. As a result, virtual environments now automatically inherit the advanced capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This approach has helped IBM and Red Hat rapidly deliver leadership in performance, scalability, manageability, and security in virtualized environments. Development is greatly simplified, as engineering teams no longer have to focus on bare-metal, virtualization, and cloud as three distinct operating environments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers enterprises the ideal platform for large-scale virtualization initiatives and internal/private cloud deployments. KVM has achieved recordsetting virtualization benchmark results as well as unmatched consolidation ratios. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enables organizations to centrally and effectively manage their entire virtual environment, including virtual datacenters, clusters, hosts, guest virtual servers, networking, and storage. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is also fully featured, with high availability, live migration, policy-based workload balancing, image management, snapshots, and thin provisioning. We saw Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as an ideal fit for Casio because it provides a key foundation for cloud deployments, said Atsushi Yazawa, deputy senior general manager, Production & Purchasing Division at Casio. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM hardware, we have been able to reduce costs significantly while also speeding up procurement, which has helped the company successfully handle business management challenges. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers includes the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, a feature-rich server-virtualization management system and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor, and supports server operating systems as virtual guests. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops is available as an add-on, and provides support for desktop operating systems as virtual guests as well as support for desktop management functionality. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been engineered to support 3
the most demanding IT infrastructures, with guest operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests and for Microsoft Windows guests, complete with paravirtualized network and block drivers. KVM s open source momentum Red Hat and IBM understand that the growth of an open virtualization ecosystem requires more than just a hypervisor. Any solution must provide a feature-rich management platform, well-defined APIs throughout the stack, an active and open development community, and third-party products that extend the hypervisor. To satisfy this need, KVM and ovirt technologies are enjoying growing industry support through the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) and the ovirt community project. The OVA is driven by leading virtualization, datacenter, and cloud solution providers that are focused on driving awareness and adoption of KVM solutions. Fostering interoperability and a thriving ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM is a primary focus for the OVA, while ovirt services the extended technical community around KVM management. A distinct value advantage Many proprietary virtualization solutions represent the profit centers for their respective owners, resulting in significant expenses to customers in the form of license fees that only grow as virtualization technology is scaled out. In contrast, Red Hat s subscription model allows organizations to deploy enterprise-grade virtualization technology at a fraction of the cost of proprietary competitors, while also avoiding vendor lock-in. IBM System x for Breakthrough Virtualization agility The long and deep collaboration between IBM and Red Hat means that the benefits of a joint solution go well beyond those of typical open source distributions. Both companies use each other s technology extensively, with Red Hat running on IBM and IBM running on Red Hat. For instance, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise IaaS services utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM on over 1,000 physical hosts, 6,000 virtual machines, across eight datacenters, all running on IBM System x idataplex servers. The benefits of a strong collaboration: IBM and focused KVM development IBM has a large development effort dedicated to KVM and has been actively contributing key KVM features since 2007. More than 65 IBM programmers work on KVM as a part of the community and collaborate with Red Hat in key areas such as engineering, performance, test, validation, support, and consulting. Beyond merely contributing to the community, IBM focuses on key development priorities for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, including: Performance and scalability through support for large memory and faster virtualized I/O with SR-IOV Security and reliability, such as MAC-level security with SELinux and common criteria certification with EAL4+ Cloud optimization, including high density of virtual machines and automated provisioning and migration 4
Conclusion Enterprise IT organizations are challenged to provide rapidly increasing IT capability while containing or reducing total costs. The strong collaboration between IBM and Red Hat means that organizations can deliver enterprise-ready virtualization solutions while realizing real benefits in terms of value, performance, scalability, security, and manageability. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 represents a strategic and cost-effective alternative to traditional virtualization solutions that lock organizations into proprietary virtualization and cloud stacks. Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 on IBM System x yields unparalleled virtualization agility. Disclosure SPEC, SPECvirt, and SPECvirt_sc are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Competitive numbers shown reflect results published on www.spec.org as of Jan. 1, 2012. For more information To learn more about how Red Hat and IBM can help optimize your IT infrastructure, contact your local salesperson or visit redhat.com or IBM.com For a free, fully supported, 60-day trial of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, visit: redhat.com/promo/rhev3 For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, visit: redhat.com/rhev3 For more information on IBM System x and BladeCenter with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit: www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/os/linux/rhel.html For more information on the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), visit: openvirtualizationalliance.org For more information on the ovirt project, visit: ovirt.org SALES AND INQUIRIES NORTH AMERICA 1 888 REDHAT1 EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA 00800 7334 2835 www.europe.redhat.com europe@redhat.com ASIA PACIFIC +65 6490 4200 apac@redhat.com LATIN AMERICA +54 11 4329 7300 latammktg@redhat.com #10330827_1212 DOC 93010 Copyright 2012 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, and JBoss are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.