Red Hat pitches x64 virtualisation

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has got its freestanding, bare-metal enterprise virtualisation hypervisor, a hardened version of the KVM hypervisor it took control of last summer, to market, says Channel Register.

That makes Red Hat a player as x64 servers the world over are set for a massive wave of virtualisation.

Red Hat announced its intentions to go up against VMware, Citrix Systems, Microsoft, and Oracle in the race to deliver commercial-grade server virtualisation for x64 iron back in February, five months after shelling out $107 million to buy Qumranet, the company behind the open source KVM project and one that was creating a stack for serving up virtual PCs.

VMware is looking to big name service providers such as Unisys, CSC, EDS and IBM to drive the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure in Australia, states Computerworld.

The company has just released View 4.0 - built on VMware's vSphere platform - and is aiming it squarely at services companies to help them establish desktop-as-a-managed service models.

“The early adopters of this technology in the past two years have been the large enterprises as they have the staff, training, hardware and SANS so it is a simple extension for them compared to SMB,” said David Wakeman, product manager, enterprise desktop ANZ at VMware.

Shortly after VMware released Fusion 3.0 with support for Windows' Aero feature, Parallels has followed suit with Desktop 5 for Mac, reports IT Wire.

But Parallels reckons good things come to those who wait, because it claims Desktop 5 "performs 22% faster than the nearest Windows-on-Mac competitor [presumably VMware] in standard productivity testing of Windows 7 64-bit on a MacBook Pro".

The company also claims version 5 is as much as three times faster for virtual machine operations and up to seven times faster for graphics performance.