Red Hat Enters VDI Fray Today

khess 0 Tallied Votes 243 Views Share

This just in: Red Hat, Inc. just announced today that its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV) now includes the ability to run Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI. I've been a long time anti-VDI voice but Red Hat just might be the one to pull it off and make it work with its KVM and the SPICE protocol both of which were acquired in their 2008 purchase of Qumranet.

If any non-container technology can make VDI work sufficiently, it is KVM and SPICE. Although, Parallels still has my highest praise as the only solution that I would personally endorse as a true, workable solution for VDI. Parallels is container or zone technology.

Unfortunately, many companies are sold on, and fully vested in, VMware technology. VMware, like KVM, is what's known as full virtualization. Full virtualization is the technology where you create fully virtualized machines and install operating systems onto those virtual machines as if they were physical systems.

KVM over SPICE has excellent, even shocking, performance compared to that of similar technologies. Red Hat has worked on this solution for almost two years and is as ready as it will ever be for prime time. I'm curious, though, as to which company or companies will bite on it as the test bed for the technology in a production environment.

It would be interesting to see how Amazon would use this technology for their elastic cloud. Right now, they're using Xen-based virtualization.

Since Red Hat is the most successful (dollars and cents-wise) of all Linux or open source companies, it will prove interesting to see how they approach marketing for this new offering.

I would also like to know that Red Hat is actually using this technology. I was quite shocked to find out that a major company that sells VDI solutions, didn't use it in their own company. I won't mention their name again but I have written about them in the past. You'll have to search Daniweb for the articles. Search for VDI.

What do you think of Red Hat's new offering? Do you think KVM and SPICE can stand the test of VDI?