Linux w/ KVM.  I’ve been waiting a long time (almost 3 years) for it to mature both in technical capability and in corporate viability.  I started using it in limited production use about 2 years ago, and in the past 12 months have migrated all physical and virtual systems over to it.  In one location to date, that includes 12 Virtual Hosts with 79 Virtual Guests – 47 Windows, 32 Linux – including several heavy SQL and Exchange Guests.  And it works well.

Virtualization is a key management tool for IT, and especially useful for Church’s and other non-profit organizations.  It can can simply day-to-day administration, enable easy business continuity planning, but it allows you to get more value for your limited financial resources.  Unfortunately, for many years the entry point has been at too high a cost.  Even for larger organizations that can justify the expense, it is money that could usually be better spent elsewhere.

Virtualization in the sense we understand it today has been made practical and useful, not by the software companies, but by the hardware manufacturers, specifically Intel and AMD.  Looking back, when Connectix released the first desktop virtualization product, Virtual PC, in 1997 the available hardware at the time made for an interesting experiment, but nothing more.  Even when 2 years later VMWare release its first product, VMWare Workstation, the state of computing power at the time was nothing like today.  In 1999, if you had a powerful x86 system it was a PIII or K7, running at 500mhz, with 100Mhz memory bus.  Not exactly an ideal machine for virtualization.  Fast forward to today where multi-core, hyper-threaded processors run at 3Ghz w/ on-die memory controllers and more memory and storage than you could imagine a few years ago.  Virtualization is now not only feasible, but warranted, as most bare-metal systems are being utilized at less than 10% of their full capacity.

Over the last few years, I have been a strong advocate of Linux w/ KVM, seeing the potential I knew it would eventually realize.  Over that time I have heard many valid concerns from those in the IT field about virtualization, and using Linux as a solution.  I think the events over the past 50 days have addressed those concerns, and make it a viable solution for any IT organization, but especially useful in the Church, and other non-profits.

Sept 2 – Red Hat releases RHEL 5.4, the first Red Hat Linux distribution with full support for the KVM Hypervisor. It also includes SAN Storage capabilities, via the iSCSI Target Framework, and an easy to use Virtual Systems management console, Virt-Manager.

September 24 – Red Hat releases Virtio drivers for Windows, providing fast and stable block and network drivers for Windows.

October 7 – Microsoft Certifies Red Hat’s KVM Hypervisor as a supported hardware platform.  This is important to IT shops that require a fully supported systems stack.

October 19 – Proxmox releases PVE 1.4.  I’ve just started playing with the new release, and it’s new storage model is nothing short of sweet.  This is a full featured, easy to install, easy to manage solution.  Included in this release is a new, flexible storage model allowing for virtual and storage Live Migration, and clustering without requiring a SAN.  Expect more information from me on this soon, as I dive into upgrading my systems (most of my Virtual Host systems are running Proxmox 1.3)

October 21 – CEntOS 5.4 is released. CEntOS is the binary compatible community support version of Red Hat 5.4.  You basically get Red Hat (including updates) for free, but without support from Red Hat.

For anyone who works in the IT field, you really owe it to yourself to at least look at Proxmox now. It is free, stable, and takes only a few minutes to install.  Even if you are already in deep with another virtualization vendor, you never know when you’ll need one more virtual host that you didn’t budget for, and you may be surprised by the powerful features packed into that open source solution.