Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. It offers customers opportunities to gain enhanced performance, centralized control and higher scalability for their systems, while deployed on a management server located inside the customer’s datacenter and firewall.

In September 2009, Red Hat released RHN Satellite 5.3, the first fully open source version of the product. This latest version offers opportunities for increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for customers with the incorporation of open source Cobbler technology in its provisioning architecture. The 5.3 release is also designed to allow customers to better scale with server growth, offering the ability to manage large numbers of systems with comparable ease to managing one.

Recently, IDC also published a Red Hat-sponsored paper featuring the systems management benefits that customers have experienced with RHN Satellite. After interviewing 10 RHN Satellite customers in depth – crossing geographies and industry verticals — IDC reported significant return on investment (ROI) and productivity results for customers. Here are some of the highlights from the customer testimonials:

• Average of 338% ROI
• Average payback period of 4.8 months
• A doubled increase in the number of Linux servers managed per system administrator
• Average annual benefit of $82,521 per 100 Linux servers
• Average of $23,207 in annual user productivity increase

In their own words, customers quoted in the paper showed that RHN Satellite helped them achieve:

• Enhanced productivity
  “If RHN Satellite Server didn’t exist, I would need another person or more.”
• Scalability
  “…with Satellite Server, once things are set up and it is in place, managing 200 servers is as easy as managing one.”
• Reduced costs
  “For an OS install, we used to hire someone outside to do the work. We would buy the hardware, then we pay them to come on site, answer questions. So now, we are completely avoiding that cost.”
• Faster server setup and management
  “As far as time saving goes, I would say we are easily saving 20 hours per month because we aren’t doing things manually.”
• Business growth
  “In terms of the impact, I always count what we can sell in an hour. If the system is down, we can’t sell and that’s a revenue impact. In just one hour, we might lose millions of euros, so the impact is huge.”

To read the full IDC paper on RHN Satellite, visit here.

To learn more about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Or, to read more about what customers have to say about RHN Satellite, visit here.

In previous Fedora 12 spotlight blogs we’ve highlighted SystemTap and desktop enhancements. Fedora 12 also includes a number of virtualization improvements, from better virtual disk performance and storage discovery to hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption and a modern network booting infrastructure. For a more in-depth look, read the collection of interviews here with members of the Fedora community who have worked directly on the many virtualization improvements in Fedora 12.

Libguestfs and guestfish make their debut in Fedora 12 and continue Fedora’s long-standing leadership in making it easier for system administrators to manage virtual machines. Libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying the disk images of virtual machines. In combination with guestfish, the libguestfs interactive shell replaces the old and cumbersome methods of accessing guest disk images — creating loopback mounts as root, using kpartx, and reconfiguring LVM. The libguestfs feature lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without any of these steps, and without booting those guests.

New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable and easy to manage solutions. In Fedora 12, administrators can now choose to use huge page backed memory to reduce memory consumption and improve performance by reducing CPU cache pressure, retain VM hardware profiles across qemu upgrades, add network interfaces to a KVM guest without restarting, and enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage and issue NPIV operations.

Several changes have been introduced to QEMU/KVM virtual machines in an effort to improve host security in the event of a flaw in the QEMU binary, and the deprecated etherboot PXE booting infrastructure has been replaced by gPXE. Fedora 12 also features improvements in the I/O performance of virtual machines using the qcow2 disk format, as well as improved tools for interface configuration.

Check out the video below, where Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields talks about a few of the Fedora 12 virtualization features with Red Hat’s Chris Wright, principal software engineer, and Hugh Brock, manager, Software Engineering.

On November 3, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, a product set including the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers. Providing the opportunity for enterprises to overcome their previous barriers to virtualization adoption – like performance, scalability, cost and security – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers offers a new alternative for enterprises looking to invest in virtualization.

In line with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, we also launched three new Red Hat Services offerings — including training, certification and consulting — that are designed to equip customers with the knowledge, professional support and hands-on skills to help them better plan, adopt and optimize their use of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Developed in tandem with the product, the following services were created and will be delivered by instructors and consultants who are trained virtualization product experts.

Training and Certification

We’ve introduced a new Red Hat Training offering, RH318 Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, to help customers develop the skills they need to deploy and manage virtual environments. The four-day course, designed for experienced Linux system administrators, will help customers to:

• Gain the knowledge and proven hands-on skills to effectively deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies.
• Acquire hands-on experience with the technology through applied lab exercises.

Along with the course, we’ve also introduced a new Red Hat Training certification, the Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA). Professionals who earn this certification have demonstrated the skills and knowledge needed to deploy and manage virtual hosts in production environments using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Like our other acclaimed certifications, the RHCVA requires candidates to pass a performance-based exam. Already, five of our channel partners have achieved the RHCVA as part of our program to create Red Hat virtualization specialists within our partner community.

Consulting

To offer customers an introduction to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies, we also now offer the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Quickstart consulting engagement. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Quickstart offers:

• One of the fastest ways to get up and running with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, aided and optimized by a Red Hat expert consultant, with confidence that the configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is done quickly and appropriately, and that functionality is fully demonstrated.
• An opportunity for organizations to gain the configuration expertise and operational knowledge to manage virtualization technologies with confidence.

To learn more about our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization training, certification and consulting opportunities, visit here.

With just a few days until the anticipated release of Fedora 12 we’re continuing our blog series on new features with a spotlight on desktop enhancements. We’ll just hit a few highlights on Fedora 12 desktop features in this blog, so if you’d like more in-depth information, be sure to check out this interview with Matthias Clasen. Matthias is a principal software engineer at Red Hat who works on the Desktop team and is also the upstream maintainer of GLib and GTK+.

NetworkManager was introduced in Fedora 7, and it has been polished release after release to provide greater usability, and is now designed to take advantage of other desktop improvements as well. In Fedora 12, NetworkManager provides comprehensive support for mobile broadband, and enhancements in the way Bluetooth and NetworkManager work together also deliver an improved experience for tethering to a supported Bluetooth-capable phone. If you’re always on the go, we believe that Fedora 12 will make it easier to be online using mobile broadband.

For users who want enhanced social experiences, Fedora 12 offers improved webcam support. Empathy, an instant messaging application that is part of the GNOME desktop, is also available in Fedora 12. It supports multiple IM protocols along with IRC, SIP (voice-over-IP) calling, and video chat. Empathy is built on top of a flexible communication framework called Telepathy, which makes it easier to integrate collaboration and communication features with the rest of the desktop. As Matthias explains, “One small glimpse of this is already visible with the ability to share your desktop with your chat contacts. We also hope to see rich integration with GNOME Shell in the future.”

In addition to individual features, Fedora 12 includes many small improvements that when combined, deliver a more enjoyable and friendly desktop experience. Here are just a few of those finishing touches that Matthias pointed out:

• Reduced visual noise by eliminated icons in menus and buttons
• Updated look and positioning of tooltips
• Improved font rendering and hinting
• Reduced frequency and updated visual appearance of notification bubbles
• Improved personalization of backgrounds by adding an easy way to get more backgrounds online

Can’t wait until the final release of Fedora 12? Download the Fedora 12 Beta here to try out the new desktop features today – and remember to update your system to the latest software and then reboot for best results. Interested in the entire list of improvements and innovations in Fedora 12? You’ll find the full feature list and details on the Fedora wiki.

Check out what the Fedora community is saying as the countdown to Fedora 12 continues. Follow Planet Fedora on twitter here: http://twitter.com/planetfedora.

While software spending in the mid-market is poised to return to positive growth , this sector of the market is generally cost conscious and is likely to expect increased ROI and high value for each dollar spent on technology. This is where we believe that server virtualization is particularly positioned to deliver, not only value, but overall savings as well.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. We expect this announcement to help our partners by driving additional value to end customers.

As The VAR Guy pointed out earlier this fall, virtualized environments can yield up to a “60% return on investment over a four year time period,” which we feel is an opportunity that our partners and their customers can’t afford to pass up.

Server virtualization is expected to help customers reduce server “sprawl,” reduce maintenance and energy costs and increase performance capabilities. Additionally, Red Hat channel partners can assist their end customers with deployment, configuration, and consultation around virtualized servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an end-to-end virtualization solution designed to enable pervasive datacenter virtualization and significantly enhance capital and operational efficiency. It consists of the following components:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers: A feature-rich server virtualization management system that provides advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A modern hypervisor based on Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology, which can be deployed either as the standalone bare metal hypervisor (included), or as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and later (purchased separately) installed as a hypervisor host and managed through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers.

With the announcement this summer of our enhanced North American Partner Program, partners in North America must be authorized to sell Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products; which includes being a registered Red Hat partner with a Virtualization Specialization. The specialization is achieved when a partner employs at least one Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technical-certified associate and at least two Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization sales-certified associates. Partners can click here to register for both the sales and technical courses.

The introduction of general availability for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an exciting opportunity for our valued partners in North America to be on the leading edge of Red Hat’s deeper expansion into the virtualization market.

Did you hear Red Hat was named #1 software vendor for value and reliability in the CIO Insight Vendor Value Study for the fifth time? That’s right. More than 650 IT executives ranked Red Hat the highest among software vendors on the overall list of IT vendors across all categories– software, networking, hardware and security. To top it off, Red Hat also topped the list for meeting expectations for increasing revenues, flexibility and responsiveness. Want to find out how Red Hat delivers value year-after-year? Come find us at one of these events around the world and let us tell you!

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Visit JBoss at the Business Rules Forum, November 1-5, in Las Vegas, NV. JBoss is a Gold Sponsor, and will be located in booth #10 on the Exhibit floor. Stop by to see a demo of our Business Rules Management System, talk to the experts, or register to win a Flip Mino Camera! For more information, click here.

Red Hat is a Gold Sponsor of the upcoming 451 Group Client Event November 3-4 in Boston, MA. Come see Red Hat Vice President of Field Marketing, Joel Berman speak on the panel “Open Source to the Rescue?” on Tuesday, November 3 at 2:30 p.m. For more information, click here.

Planning to attend the USDA/ NITC Technology Expo in Kansas City, MO on November 4? Come talk with Red Hat Government Solutions. For more information, click here.

Red Hat is a premier sponsor of GOSCON DC on November 5. Held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., GOSCON DC is designed to meet the needs of senior IT executives of federal agencies and regional, state, and local government. For more information and to register, click here.

Come have breakfast with Red Hat! At the Red Hat & IBM Executive Breakfast Series, IBM and Red Hat will discuss the benefits of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM platforms from Sun Solaris solutions. Check out when and where you can receive valuable insight from Red Hat and IBM below. For more information and to register for one of these events, click here.

Nov. 5,, Toronto, The Intercontinental Centre
Nov. 12, Chicago, Blackstone Renaissance

Check out the Red Hat booth at SuperComputing 2009, November 14-20 in Portland. SC09 will feature interesting and innovative HPC scientific and technical applications from around the world. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will deliver a talk at Carnegie Mellon University on November 16. More information to come soon!

Calling all Red Hat Certified Engineers! Red Hat is hosting an RHCE Loopback, November 18 at the Philadelphia Mission Grill. Get together to network, share tips and technical tricks, discuss new technologies and hear from experts on current and future industry trends. For more information and to register, click here.

Visit Red Hat at booth number 2829 at I/ITSEC 2009, November 30 – December 3 in Orlando. The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference promotes cooperation among the Armed Services, Industry, Academia and various Government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs, identification of common training issues and development of multiservice programs. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

Red Hat will give a technical presentation on Fedora for System Z, RHEL 5.4 and more at the IBM Large Systems Update series. See below for dates, locations, and links for more information.

Nov. 2-3, 2009: IBM Lyngby, Nymøllevej 91, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Nov. 3-4, 2009: IBM Helsinki, Laajalahdentie 23, 00330 Helsinki
Nov. 4-5, 2009: IBM Århus, Bytoften 1, 8240 Risskov
Nov. 9-10, 2009: Rosenholmveien 25, Kolbotn, Oslo
Nov. 10-11, 2009: Oddegatan 5, Stockholm
Nov. 10-11, 2009: IBM Lyngby, Nymøllevej 91, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Nov. 11-12, 2009: Lindholmspiren 5, Goteborg

Red Hat will be at LinuxWorld Netherlands, November 4-5. Visit the Red Hat booth and attend sessions by Red Hat associates. For more information and to register, click here.

For the fourth year in a row, JBoss will attend Devoxx, the biggest Java community conference in Europe, as a premium sponsor. Come see several JBoss engineers speak at the event, November 16-20 in Antwerp/Belgium, to present the newest JBoss products and developer tools. For information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will host the November Red Hat Tour de France events in Toulouse, November 17 and Lille, November 19. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat and IBM invite you to learn about the winning combination of IBM mainframe technology and Linux on November 24 at IBM United Kingdom Limited in London. Get insights on how Red Hat Enterprise Linux can make your IT life easier and how we can help you reduce IT spending. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

Red Hat will be at SAP TechEd India, November 18-20 in Bangalore. Join us at the KTPO Trade Center and dive deep into the world of SAP TechED to get hands-on technical training, build real connections with SAP experts and community members, and gain the inspiration and skills needed to maximize your impact on your organization. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.
Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

There are plenty of new features slated for Fedora 12 and we’ll be featuring just a few over the next few weeks in our spotlight feature blog series. Enhancements to SystemTap should delight developers and system administrators. Here are just a few of the reasons why we love SystemTap — be sure to check out a more in-depth overview and podcast on SystemTap here.

Red Hat’s Will Cohen, a performance tools engineer and SystemTap developer, best sums up SystemTap in stating: “Being able to modify and instrument code to understand what is going on in open source is cool, but having to recompile the code and restart machine to run that modified code isn’t so cool. SystemTap provides infrastructure to simplify that instrumentation process. It allows developers and system administrators to instrument the kernel and user space programs without the need to recompile, restart or even stop your program or system. They can observe what is happening without having to stop or interrupt anything.”

SystemTap 1.0, which is part of Fedora 12, brings at least three significant sets of improvements. First, it includes a variety of new features, such as the ability to take advantage of kernel tracepoints, extended support for C++ code, and a set of static probe markers programmers can include in their code to make tracing easier. If supporting debugging information or “debuginfo” isn’t installed on the system, the newest versions of SystemTap even suggest the command needed to get the appropriate debuginfo RPM installed. Developers are currently at work making that debuginfo more compact, and we expect to see that feature in a future Fedora release, supported fully by SystemTap.

Second, SystemTap has been closely integrated with the popular Eclipse IDE so developers can launch SystemTap scripts on their C/C++ projects from within Eclipse itself, as well as providing an anchor for linking SystemTap data with Eclipse graphics.

Third, the SystemTap developers have listened to SystemTap users, and now provide a more robust set of documentation, tutorials, and example scripts. These materials are designed to make it easier for programmers to get started using SystemTap, not only by giving them fuller explanations of the tools available, but by allowing them to follow or adapt the example scripts for their own use. These example scripts are used in the test suite, so SystemTap can continue to provide a set of examples that work with each new release.

If you’re interested in learning more about SystemTap, the documentation along with tutorials and examples are available here. Or just install Fedora 12’s “systemtap” package, which includes the documentation on your system automatically. (Hint: You can get the pre-release Fedora 12 Beta now and try it out.)

We’ve been using the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) solution in our production environment at Red Hat for two months and I wanted to share our experience. We are a participant in the RHEV beta program and partnered with our product organization in support of the deployment.

We are operating 24 virtual machines in production. They include six JBoss cluster nodes for our Java services that drive www.redhat.com; four Knowledgebase cluster nodes used by our customers and customer support team; six mail exchanger nodes handling our internal email delivery; and four mail exchanger nodes handling our external email delivery. The physical infrastructure consists of a blade chassis with 14 HS21 blades (8GB RAM, dual core processor) and 1.2TB of SAN based storage provided by our Network Appliance infrastructure. The production nodes have been stable. They are performing equivalently to the bare metal nodes they replaced for both the JBoss and external mail exchanger workloads. Performance of the other nodes is very acceptable and in line with our expectations.

Also as expected, RHEV has given us the ability to monitor resource utilization and quickly provision new nodes. We have information and tools to plan for future capacity increases. The resource management tools are excellent. RHEV does a very good job of transparently managing storage, memory and processor utilization. The presentation of the allocation and utilization of resources is very clear. Live migrations, including automatic migrations, are very fast and reliable. The paravirtualized drivers are a significant improvement over base KVM and Xen and have performed very well. The management interface is intuitive and generally easy to use.

The RHEV hypervisor installs were easy and integrated well with our automated installation framework. As noted, the product is solid and resilient. We haven’t experienced any crashes or other hypervisor problems as are often encountered in beta environments. The virtual machines behave exactly as one would expect and respond to our existing tools just like our physical hosts. We encountered three issues during installation, but were able to resolve them quickly with workarounds or configuration changes. It took us roughly one week to install the machines and get them into production. Deployment has been a very solid experience for a beta environment.

In addition to our server deployment, we are working to deploy a RHEV cluster to provide desktop virtualization for end user applications and expect to have it up and running later this month.

The Fedora Project’s latest release Fedora 12 – codename “Constantine” – is anticipated to be released in November. Much like its namesake Constantine, Fedora 12 is ready to unite with a feature set that includes plenty for everyone!

Fedora 12 is expected to include numerous enhancements and features added since the release of Fedora 11 in June 2009, such as these:

• PackageKit has grown the ability to automatically install the software packages that provide new commands when the user is operating a text terminal. It also now supports a browser plugin that allows software vendors of any size to provide automatic installation of software packages using simple HTML object tags.
• Enhancements to NetworkManager to make both system-wide connections and mobile broadband connections easier than ever. Signal strength and network selection are available for choosing the best mobile broadband connection when you’re on the road. And if you’re at a system that requires an always-on connection or static addressing, NetworkManager now is designed to allow you to configure that connection directly from the desktop, and includes PolicyKit integration so configuration management can be done via central policy where needed.
• For several years, the open, free Ogg Theora format has provided a way for freedom-loving users to share video. Fedora 12 includes the new Theora 1.1, which achieves near-H.264 quality in a completely free and open codec and format. (A detailed and highly technical status report can be found here.) With the introduction of Theora 1.1, we believe that the quality of free video will meet or exceed user expectations, delivering crisp, vibrant media in both streaming and downloadable form.
• New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable, and easy to manage solutions. The newest features include better memory and performance management, hot network adapter changes, discovery of SAN storage, improved virtual disk image performance, a newer PXE boot infrastructure, and the new libguestfs library and guestfish shell to allow highly automated manipulation of virtual machines outside the virtualization environment.

We encourage everyone to download the Beta and take it for a spin. Let us know what you think and be sure to report any issues with the Beta to help Fedora improve the final release. Anyone can download the Beta as an installation medium or a Live image to try it on their system. Check it out today by downloading here.

Red Hat continues to be very active in the cloud computing arena, so it seems like a good time to provide an update on some recent activities.

First is Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens’ keynote speech at the recent Red Hat Summit and JBoss World events in Chicago. Brian focused his presentation on cloud computing and referenced a number of cloud-related open source projects that Red Hat is supporting. To see his presentation, please visit here. The conference also featured a number of cloud presentations, which you can download from here.

At the 100,000-foot level, during the last few months a couple of fairly obvious patterns appear to be emerging:

• The first is that cloud computing seems to be primarily x86 based, and 64-bit x86 at that. This appears to be driven by the strong desire of cloud consumers to use standardized hardware and software wherever possible. And, we believe that it is being enabled by the latest generation of x86 processors, which feature lots of cores for huge processing power, very large memory capabilities and small space/power requirements. Red Hat’s experience to date with its cloud customers is that they are all x86-based. Perhaps a small percentage of non-x86 clouds will be built, but it seems very likely that they will be limited to private deployments. Some expect this further adoption of the x86 architecture to hasten the decline of RISC/UNIX in the market.
• The second is that while the benefits of clouds are well understood by most CIOs and IT managers, the barriers to widespread cloud adoption are also becoming clear. One of the most important barriers relates to cloud standards or, the other side of the same coin, the need to avoid any sort of vendor lock-in. Clearly, until cloud standards are established and accepted by cloud service providers, customers are likely to limit their usage of cloud computing, reducing its potential value. Other barriers range from technical (such as ensuring security) to operational (application data management) to business issues (pricing models). So, while there are successful clouds available today, there is still a lot of work to be done before cloud computing is appropriate for a wide range of deployments.

Coming down from the 100,000-foot clouds, some exciting recent developments include:

• On October 5th, DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) announced the availability of its RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) cloud capability. See here and here.

  RACE is available internally to DoD (US Department of Defense) organizations. “This is all about our customers,” said Henry J. Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director, DISA Computing Services, adding, “RACE is a first for DoD – our users can now customize, purchase, and receive their test and development computing platform within 24 hours and the production environments within 72 hours, and that’s a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements.”

  RACE is x86-based and provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows guests.

• On October 8th, NTT Communications launched its cloud beta, based on Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology. See here.

  NTT, a major Japanese telecommunications company, partnered with Red Hat to create its cloud platform. And, NTT continues to work with Red Hat to advance the capabilities of KVM.

• Deltacloud, announced by Brian Stevens during his Red Hat Summit keynote, appears to be attracting attention as a way to address interoperability concerns. The following excerpt provides an overview of Deltacloud:

  With the rapidly expanding cloud market, there will be a profusion of suppliers, offering a wide range of capabilities (from high-cost, high-performance, high-security, high-availability, to low-cost with few guarantees). Suppliers are already offering a range of management APIs (interfaces) and tools for customers that reflect the capabilities they offer. Concurrent with this, customers are building private clouds that they will eventually wish to integrate with external suppliers. The resulting range of management interfaces will complicate the seamless integration of private and multiple public clouds, making them less valuable to customers. This is where Deltacloud comes in – its goal is to provide an open, standardized interface that can be used to manage any and all clouds. Being an open source project, customers and suppliers will be able to extend it to meet their needs. Backend drivers will provide the connection to individual cloud services. Essentially Deltacloud becomes a cloud management broker – for example, a management application using Deltacloud would be able to identify a low cost cloud, or a high performance cloud, or a highly secure cloud, and provide a consistent management interface to all of them. In this way Deltacloud does not replace individual cloud management capabilities, rather it provides a higher-level abstraction across a broad landscape of clouds.

• On October 7, Red Hat and Microsoft announced the completion of our first virtualization certifications, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows can be deployed together, as host or guest, and be fully supported by both companies. Details of this announcement can be seen on Red Hat website.

  This announcement opens the way for customers who are looking to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows together on their private clouds to move ahead — confident that these heterogeneous configurations have been tested and that both companies will stand by them. So hosting and cloud providers now have more flexibility to mix and match Red Hat and Microsoft virtualization technologies. Of course, we are driving to make our virtualization solution valuable and compelling, so that customers will choose a Red Hat virtualization infrastructure for their clouds but, as we’ve pointed out several times in this blog, choice, coexistence and standards are the values that we expect will make clouds successful.

  To summarize, the completed certifications include:

  • Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the KVM hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
  • Certification of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.
• Last, but certainly not least, Amazon EC2, Red Hat’s first cloud computing partner, appears to be growing from strength to strength. We have had Red Hat offerings on EC2 for 18+ months. We are seeing stronger interest in wider adoption of EC2 deployments using both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss, and we continue to work closely with Amazon on future cloud technologies, so stay tuned for more news on that front later this year.

To summarize, the last few months have seen great progress from Red Hat in the cloud computing space. Standards-based open source technology is a natural fit for the cloud. As with other areas of technology focus, Red Hat seeks to drive innovation as rapidly as possible to enable customers and partners to realize the efficiencies of cloud computing quickly.