An Overview of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - page 3

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open source hypervisor solution ( http://www.linux-
kvm.org/page/Main_Page ) for Linux that supports x86, PowerPC, and S390 CPU architec-
ture that contains virtualization extensions. KVM uses the hardware virtualization support
of these processors and effectively turns your Linux kernel into a bare metal hypervisor. It
supports a mixed workload of various guest operating systems that run your applications on
Linux and Windows in order to host critical and noncritical applications. Many current
Linux distributions ship KVM and the Red-Hat-included KVM hypervisor technology in a
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5 update 4 and its later release.
KVM outperforms other virtualization hypervisors in various virtualization scenarios, and
it has top scores in the SPECvirt_2010 virtualization benchmark. It includes the overall top
performance scores and the highest number of performant VMs running on a single hyper-
visor. KVM is free software that was released under the GPL, and it's a powerful open
source hypervisor solution alternative to the VMware, Citrix Xen, and Hyper-V RHEV
overview.
The RHEV platform is an enterprise-grade, centralized-management hypervisor for server
and desktop virtualization. It's a complete virtualization management solution that provides
fully integrated management of your virtual infrastructures. The RHEV platform includes
two major components: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, which is a centralized
management server, and optimized KVM hypervisor software, which hosts the virtual ma-
chines.
Red Hat supports RHEV through the subscription model, which provides enterprise-ready
solutions that can be confidently deployed to manage even your most mission-critical ap-
plications. Red Hat subscription gives you access to the Red Hat customer portal ( ht-
tps://access.redhat.com ) and provides simple, integrated access to all features of your sub-
scription. Users can open support tickets, read and download the documentation, and find
useful information in the knowledge base.
RHEV is based on the KVM hypervisor and the upstream oVirt open virtualization man-
agement platform, which is a project started by Red Hat and released to the open source
community ( http://www.ovirt.org/Home ). oVirt is the community-supported open source
project. It will be the baseline of RHEV products, and it's very similar to RHEL, which is
based on the Fedora distro.