I arrived yesterday in beautiful Barcelona for VMworld Europe. Out my airplane window, I caught a glimpse of the Red Hat logo emblazoned on a field on the landing path for the airport. Very cool.
The interest in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization continues to grow, especially now that we’re heading toward RHEV 3.1 release at the end of the year. The beta program, open to existing RHEV customers or through Red Hat partners and direct sales, is going very well. For more on the features and functionality in RHEV 3.1, see my previous post from Red Hat Summit.
Last month, I did a short trip through Eastern Canada to meet with customers and partners in Montreal and Toronto. One theme came shining through: customers are ready to diversify their virtualization infrastructure, and are looking to RHEV to do it. Even though VMware rightly eliminated the VRAM pricing for vSphere 5.0 and 5.1, customers are still concerned about being locked in to a single vendor, and are still waiting for the promised savings from virtualizing their workloads. Now is a great time to be checking out alternatives like RHEV.
Our friends at Zenoss also recently published some interesting data on virtualization and public cloud. Their survey results, published here on their blog at http://blog.zenoss.com/2012/10/the-state-of-the-open-source-cloud-2012-infographic-report/ shows a couple of interesting things.
One is the growth of the use of RHEV, at least among this audience, is remarkable given our short time on the market. And combined with the use of generic Linux KVM is tied with the overall use of opensource Xen and Citrix XenServer among Zenoss users. While I’d like to see more use of RHEV, obviously, it’s another testament to the momentum behind KVM and RHEV.
The second interesting point is the momentum behind OpenStack. Fully 50% of respondents say they have deployed an OpenStack open source cloud. The greatest barrier to open sound cloud adoption is maturity, followed by lack of support and concerns around security.
Many of your already know that Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack for over a year. We were the number 3 contributer to Essex and have stepped up our involvement since then, announcing that we were joining the OpenStack Foundation as a Platinum member and releasing a Preview of our OpenStack distribution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To join the preview, go to http://openstack.redhat.com/
One of the reasons that Red Hat has joined the OpenStack community is that many of our customers are very excited about OpenStack, but have expressed many of the same concerns that Zenoss uncovered in their research. Making OpenStack stable, supportable, and secure is key to its broad adoption, and the skills required to do that are what Red Hat has demonstrated many times in the open source community, beginning with our enterprise grade Linux and virtualization solutions.
Our OpenStack Preview will soon be updated from the Essex release to the Folsom release (which just came out a week or so ago). Folsom will form the basis of our product release early next year.
To learn more about Red Hat’s OpenStack strategy, check out our OpenStack FAQ. And if you’re in San Diego next week for OpenStack Summit, come stop by our booth and meet me and some of our OpenStack engineers. We will be presenting at the Summit as well, including information on our release strategy.
