back to article Red Hat: We do clouds at one third the cost of VMware

The annual Red Hat Summit is underway in Boston this week, and the cloud is at the center of everything that Shadowman is doing these days. Like everyone else peddling IT products, Red Hat is hoping to catch its next wave of growth from the move to clouds, but as we all know, there will be more losers than winners in this next …

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  1. pPPPP

    VMWare has a huge footprint in this area, some very mature code and some nice features. Redhat can compete on price, as KVM is free, but the enterprise features are going to make a huge difference. Looks like they're going in the right direction.

    I've had a dabble with KVM and QEmu and so far I've been very impressed.

  2. Mad Chaz
    Linux

    A sample of 1

    I've actually played with KVM, Vmware and Virtualbox before I built my last system, to see how each worked.

    The command line junky in me loved KVM and could live with Virtualbox. I hated vmware on that account, at least on the products I could try then. But in the end, the one thing that impressed me the most about KVM was the number on my UPS that indicated energy usage in Watts.

    KVM was easilly the most awesome one on that account. On the same machine, at idle, the machine would consume a consistant 20 watts less energy then with either of the other 2, making it drain 115W instead of 135W with the other 2.

    Doing a performance benchmark in the VMs afterward showed the footprint of the virtualisation layer was also very different. KVM would cause around 5% overhead and was extremely consistent, compared to between 8% and 15% with the other 2, with a lot of fluctuation, not always for obvious reasons, or any I could find really.

    A sample of 1, so YMMV

  3. h3

    KVM is the only technology I have not played with.

    Opensolaris + Xen + ZFS was so close to perfect but had some bugs that couldn't be fixed by me . (And never will be by Oracle. I don't expect anyone else to either illumos don't understand the xen code enough to maintain it).

    I am using hyperv server 2012 (All Cli booting from usb with ReFS) right now. It is working wonderfully as well as anything else I have ever used. Running Centos / Freebsd / Windows vm's.

    Xen Server and Xen Cloud Platform are ok but I want some of the ReFS/ZFS type features.

    ESXi is deliberately gimped too much for it to be of any use to me.

    If I didn't have any WIndows stuff I would probably use Xen on Netbsd.

    I haven't tried kvm on Solaris (Via the joytech project) because as far as I know it needs a really expensive nic. (Or to pass through a nic per vm).

    1. Nigel 11
      Go

      ZFS is coming to Linux

      ZFS is coming to linux - it escaped Oracle's control.

      http://zfsonlinux.org/

      As usual for open source there's healthy competition between the ZFS port and that new kid on the block called btrfs. And as usual with filesystems, especially complex ones, it'll be a few years yet before either is ready for serious production work.

  4. Bill the Sys Admin
    Thumb Up

    I think the fact that if you go with their private cloud you get unlimited RHEL guests is key! For people thinking about any kind of visualization they would have to think about this. Obviously that depends on the pricing for the private cloud. But I will be keeping my eye on this most certainly.

  5. rch

    PowerVM

    Power and PowerVM is a rock solid combination. Why on earth would anyone run KVM instead?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: PowerVM

      IBM also has GPFS, which is probably the best single name space clustered file system on the market... even though no one knows about it except for a handful of large enterprises.... PowerVM has some nice ISV advantages, such as being able to hard partition Oracle instead of VMware's software partition where you need to license every core on the machine and every associated, VMotion enabled, core. That alone generally makes Power-AIX less costly than x86-VMware.

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