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-Use Pricing Model Encourages Virtualization">
This new server solution would be priced on a subscription basis like Red Hats other products, but the pricing model would allow unlimited customer use, so as to make virtualization and RHEL use pervasive, he said.
Tim Yeaton, Red Hats executive vice president for enterprise solutions, agreed, saying the goal was to make virtualization technology easy to consume and utilize.
As such, it is unlikely that Red Hat would price this on a per-instance basis, he said. Rather, the solution will probably be priced on a platform basis so as not to let pricing stand in the way of the pervasive adoption of virtualization technology in RHEL 5, he said.
Meanwhile, this comes as Microsoft Corp. is pushing its own virtualization products and recently relaxed some of its licensing requirements around Windows Server 2003 to facilitate more pervasive adoption and use of those technologies.
In addition, Stevens dismissed—at least for the time being—analyst speculation that Red Hat was looking at developing a set of management tools to take advantage of the Xen virtualization capabilities, which could lead to it competing with its partners like IBM.
To read more about Microsofts move to simplify its Windows Server licensing, click here.
While that could well happen a few years down the line, there are currently no such plans and no secret projects around this taking place within Red Hat, he told eWEEK.
In fact, Red Hats priority is helping its partners to compete in the management space, and that means allowing them to interface to the virtualization-enabled version of RHEL, he said.
"The first step in that process is to design a set of stable APIs and ABIs [application binary interfaces] for virtual machine control," Stevens said.
These APIs, as for resource management and policy-based management, would not be Xen-specific and would be licensed in a way that also allowed them to interface with proprietary code, Stevens said.
Asked about Red Hats business relationship with XenSource, Stevens said this was something the companies were working on and, again, stressed that Red Hat was not planning to try and develop a management solution that would compete with XenSource.
According to Stevens, some 80 percent of customers were "totally jazzed" by virtualization, while the other 20 percent were not interested. But the integration of the technology into Red Hats products is still at an early stage, he added.
Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available in March, as early as the week of March 20. Fedora Core 5 will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology and will "create a core of use around virtualization technology," he said.
Then, in the summer of 2006, Red Hat will make its Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5, which is scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualization, he said.
Even Red Hats chip-set partners, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, are also both at a proof-of-concept stage with regard to the use of virtualization technology internally, Stevens said.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.
To read more about Microsofts move to simplify its Windows Server licensing, click here.
While that could well happen a few years down the line, there are currently no such plans and no secret projects around this taking place within Red Hat, he told eWEEK.
In fact, Red Hats priority is helping its partners to compete in the management space, and that means allowing them to interface to the virtualization-enabled version of RHEL, he said.
"The first step in that process is to design a set of stable APIs and ABIs [application binary interfaces] for virtual machine control," Stevens said.
These APIs, as for resource management and policy-based management, would not be Xen-specific and would be licensed in a way that also allowed them to interface with proprietary code, Stevens said.
Asked about Red Hats business relationship with XenSource, Stevens said this was something the companies were working on and, again, stressed that Red Hat was not planning to try and develop a management solution that would compete with XenSource.
According to Stevens, some 80 percent of customers were "totally jazzed" by virtualization, while the other 20 percent were not interested. But the integration of the technology into Red Hats products is still at an early stage, he added.
Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available in March, as early as the week of March 20. Fedora Core 5 will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology and will "create a core of use around virtualization technology," he said.
Then, in the summer of 2006, Red Hat will make its Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5, which is scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualization, he said.
Even Red Hats chip-set partners, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, are also both at a proof-of-concept stage with regard to the use of virtualization technology internally, Stevens said.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis. 
