Red Hat held the Dubai leg of its Partner
Virtualization Roadshow on November 20th at the Arjaan Rotana in Dubai Media
City.
Anuj Kumar (General Manager Middle-East and Africa) and David Postel (Channel
Manager Middle-East and Northern Africa) presented the morning business track
along with special guest Ramzi Abdulbaki (Market Development Manager) from
Premier Partner Intel Corp, whilst Sherif Abdelgawad (Services Director
Middle-East and Africa) animated the technical afternoon session.
Representatives from 12 distributors, system integrators and Intel spanning the
UAE, Qatar and Jordan attended the one day event.
The seminar focused on Red Hat’s virtualization solutions both available today
and near future roadmap. More than a IT marketing buzzword, virtualization has
indeed become a trend and, for a lot of infrastructures, a necessity. With the
launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March 2007, Red Hat became a player in
the virtualization game as it included the Open Source Xen hypervisor in its
distribution. One of the main particularities of red Hat’s product is that for
the normal price of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for the physical
server host, virtualization comes out of the box at no extra cost, and with the
potential for an unlimited number of free virtual guests. It was explained how
Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows for both full and para virtualization, and how
Red Hat and Intel collaborated to obtain near native performance on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 guests with the latest Intel chips.
Red Hat introduced its recent acquisition of US-based Qumranet which adds the
new Linux kernel approved KVM hypervisor as well as their SolidICE VDI
architecture to its portfolio. KVM will be introduced as an alternative to Xen
in an upcoming update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in 2009, whilst Red Hat’s
new VDI product should start being commercialised in the Middle-East in mid
2009.
The Raleigh, North Carolina based vendor, which recently announced the opening
of its first office in the Middle-East in Dubai Internet City, went on to
detail its leading role in the development and implementation of the Libvirt
hypervisor-agnostic virtualization abstraction layer, as well as its upcoming
oVirt set of graphical virtual system management tools.
Mr Abdelgawad concluded by demonstrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
virtualization features, including live migration, as well as a preview of KVM
and oVirt.
The next and final leg of the roadshow will take place in Riyadh at the
beginning of February.
