RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat, Inc., provider of open source solutions, today announced its virtualization strategy for 2009 and beyond, outlining plans to significantly expand and enhance its server, client and management products to enable ubiquitous adoption of virtualization across the enterprise.

Red Hat is in a unique position to deliver comprehensive virtualization for customers. Leveraging a strong ecosystem of hardware and software partners, the Company will focus on breaking down barriers to reliable, large-scale virtualization deployment. Virtualization provides a foundational component of Red Hat's broader strategy to deliver flexible cloud computing environments with the ability to deploy any application, anywhere, at anytime.

Red Hat has held a strong position in the virtualization industry since the debut of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization technology integrated into the operating system, making it the leading commercial-quality open source virtualization solution.

Today, though the adoption of virtualization technologies is growing rapidly, and delivering high return on investment, industry analyst research indicates that many customers have yet to deploy virtualization in enterprise and mission-critical environments.

Red Hat is leveraging this opportunity with the announcement of its strategy to deliver a high-performance, secure and manageable infrastructure for the enterprise, spanning datacenters and internal and external clouds running a wide range of enterprise workloads.

As part of Red Hat's strategy to offer customers a complete set of virtualization solutions that allows the entire spectrum of enterprise workloads to run on one common infrastructure, it announces the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products, including four primary components:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
Red Hat's strategic direction for the future development of its virtualization product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualization vendor leveraging technology that is developed as part of the Linux operating system. Existing Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat will provide a variety of tools and services to enable customers to migrate from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen deployment to KVM.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers:
A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops:
A new management system for virtual desktops that will deliver industry-leading VDI cost-performance for both Linux and Windows desktops, based on Qumranet's SolidICE and using SPICE remote rendering technology.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor:
A new standalone hypervisor designed to be ideal for Red Hat's partners and customers to lay down a standard, lightweight, high-performance virtualization foundation for guest environments.

"With Red Hat's strategy and virtualization roadmap outlined today, Red Hat is uniquely positioned to extend the reach of virtualization with our complete virtualization solutions portfolio, combining our core operating system strength, next-generation virtualization technology and quality, scalable management tools," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

"With this complete set of virtualization solutions, Red Hat is breaking through barriers to lift the limitations placed on virtualization and cloud computing for today's enterprises," he added.

Red Hat plans for the new virtualization products in Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization suite to be delivered sequentially over the next three to 18 months, with delivery dates beginning in the middle of 2009.