The new open-source project is focused on delivering an openly developed and freely licensed virtualization system.
While many of the products and services that make up the x86
virtualization space are shot through with open-source components, these freely
licensed and openly developed elements tend to serve as low-level building
blocks-providers of storage, networking or compute resources in larger
proprietary systems.
Over the past few years, one of the starkest examples of
this has been Red Hat's server and virtualization product, Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualization (RHEV), which combines open-source network, storage and compute components
with the proprietary Windows-based management server and administration tool
set.
Red Hat picked up the .Net-based management server product
as part of its acquisition of desktop-virtualization startup Qumranet in 2008,
and began porting the server to Java while selling the Qumranet product under
Red Hat's brand. The newly ported software will serve as the foundation both of
RHEV 3.0 (currently in beta) and of a new open-source project, called oVirt,
that's focused on delivering the openly developed and freely licensed
virtualization system.
The oVirt project got its start at the beginning of this
month at a workshop, run by Red Hat and hosted at Cisco's Milpitas, Calif.,
campus. Following the workshop, Git software repositories for each of its
component subprojects went alive, along with a fledgling set of build instructions
on
the project's Wiki site.
I spent about a week working with the newly open-sourced
oVirt code. It's fairly early days for the project, and it took a fair amount
of effort building the project's management server, called oVirt Engine,
deploying it on Red Hat's JBoss Java application server, and connecting the
engine to compute and storage resources in our lab.
Once I had the system up and running, I used it to create
and run a handful of Windows and Linux virtual machines. I was impressed by
oVirt's core VM-hosting capabilities, and by its Web-based administration and
user portals, which I found very responsive and fairly easy to use.
I intend to keep an oVirt installation around in the lab for
a while, to put the system through its paces and better learn how it stacks up
against the vSphere installation we use for much of our testing. At this point,
I wouldn't recommend the project for production duties, as oVirt doesn't yet
enjoy the sort of community that more established open-source projects such as
Debian or CentOS have accumulated.
Those interested in checking out oVirt with a minimum of
hassle would do better to give the latest beta of RHEV 3.0 a try, or to wait
for oVirt packages to make their way into Fedora Linux. Along with members from
Red Hat and from infrastructure providers Intel, NetApp, Cisco and IBM, the
oVirt project's board includes members from Linux vendors Canonical and SUSE.
I'm interested to see whether Ubuntu and OpenSUSE move to fold oVirt into their
own freely available distributions, as well.
Whether oVirt can succeed in taking a chunk out of VMware's
market share remains to be seen, particularly given the fact that
virtualization space is crowded with strong competition from Microsoft, Citrix
and Oracle, among others. However, just as Microsoft's move to ship Hyper-V
along with every copy of Windows server gave that virtualization system a
boost, Red Hat's move to turn loose its code stands to give oVirt a similar
shot in the arm-particularly if other Linux distributions embrace the project.
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