Red Hat Session at Cloud Expo

The first beta of the KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV) 2.2 - a rev of the stuff IBM is using for its test & dev cloud - was pushed out the door Monday and for the first time the widgetry supports both virtual servers and virtual desktops.

The desktop stuff isn't standalone anymore. The SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) protocol that Red Hat got when it bought Qumranet about 18 months ago renders the desktops. There's a connection broker and a web portal where users go to access their desktops.

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The beta can also do other tricks like import and export virtual machine images and templates from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and automatically convert VMware or Xen virtual machines into KVM virtual machines complements of its V2V tool - well, it can if they were Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines to begin with.

Red Hat's gonna add XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machine images down the road.

REV includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, so users can analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

The beta also supports bigger VMs. Their maximum memory has been upped from 64GB to 256GB, which Red Hat figures should let the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads be virtualized.

The hypervisor should support the new Nehalem-EX and AMD Magny-Cours multi-core chips too.

Figure general availability in a few months.