"Conservative estimates show that servers typically operate at between 15 and 25 percent of CPU capacity, but with virtualisation that could improve to 80 percent," said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat.  "Our customers, who already see Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the choice for lower cost of ownership, will be able to ride this next wave of virtualisation to further reduce costs and increase operational efficiency.  Red Hat's strategy is to methodically target and reduce every cost driver associated with deploying IT infrastructure, we believe integrated virtualisation will be a major milestone in this effort."

At a local level, Red Hat reports seeing great customer interest in virtualisation technologies.  "Whenever I talk to customers, they are looking for solutions that will allow them to get more performance, and that's one of the major attractions of Red Hat - twice the performance at half the cost," said Max McLaren, General Manager, Red Hat Australia and New Zealand.  "With the introduction of integrated virtualisation, this performance will be even further enhanced as customers get more out of each CPU."

Red Hat says it will will tightly integrate virtualisation capabilities with its operating system and ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, from management tools and installation to software management, will enable customers to deploy virtualised environments easily and effectively.
 
This month Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available, which will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualisation technology. In the summer of 2006, Red Hat plans to make Virtualisation Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualisation beta.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 5, scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualisation. 

"By the end of this year the integration of Xen into Red Hat Enterprise Linux will result in several important customer benefits, including better support for consolidation; more flexible lifecycle management; and improved workload management and availability, said Tony Iams, Vice President of System Software Research  at Ideas International. "Further, by making Xen a pervasive part of its Linux distribution, Red Hat will drive virtualisation deeply into the mainstream."