Red Hat Revs While VMware Takes to the Streets

"KVM has been part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux since the release of version 5.4 back in September. At the time, the new KVM virtualization base was big news. It's still an important part of the OS. So much so that now Red Hat is further expanding with RHEL 5.5, which it released to beta on Wednesday. The key enhancement is a new run-time memory allocation feature for KVM virtual guests that allows them guests to obtain extra memory as required, and thus not "be stuck with a fixed amount of memory, as Internetnews reports.

"This will mitigate many of the I/O issues frequently associated with virtualization. For an organization for which I/O is a significant pain point, having it resolved natively may prove to be a sufficient advantage.

"The other virtualization improvement Internetnews notes is PCI passthrough, which "enables a virtual operating system to see and utilize a computer's PCI devices as though they were physically attached. With RHEL 5.5, Red Hat has improved support for PCI passthrough on both AMD and Intel chipsets."

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