Red Hat virtual desktop technology heads into beta tests

Side-by-side Windows displays might be the last thing you would expect to see taking center stage at Red Hat's booth at the recent Interop show in Las Vegas. But it makes sense when you consider they were part of a demo showcasing the company's pursuit of what it sees as a huge opportunity: the emerging virtual desktop market.

[ Slideshow: 13 desktop virtualization tools ]

Don't get the wrong idea, though. Red Hat isn't giving in on physical or virtual Linux desktops. It's just being realistic about the role Windows will have in virtual desktops given its dominance in physical desktops.

Red Hat's virtual desktop infrastructure technology heads into beta testing in coming weeks and is slated for general availability around the time of the company's annual Red Hat Summit, which will be held in Chicago in September. The company will offer virtual desktops and servers, plus a common management platform.

"Virtualization is a major strategic focus for us," says Jim Brennan, senior product marketing manager for management and security at Red Hat.

The company's virtualization scheme going forward is based largely on technology obtained via its acquisition of Qumranet last fall. However, Red Hat has been offering virtualization based on the Xen hypervisor as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux since RHEL 5.0 shipped in March 2007 and will support Xen until at least 2014, according to Brennan.

The company calls its line the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) portfolio. Red Hat's effort, which it outlined in February, includes building on the open source KVM hypervisor (now part of the Linux kernel) and zippy SPICE communications protocol (an alternative to RDP or Citrix's ICA) developed by Qumranet. Red Hat touts the ability of SPICE, which stands for Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments, to handle heavy-duty graphics and video as well as plain old office applications.

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