KVM: Your Key to Open Source Server Virtualization

"Considering a switch to a virtualized infrastructure strikes fear into the hearts of even the most educated among today's CIOs. Technology confusion and vendor choices aside, the physical-to-virtual transition dread stems from security concerns, performance uncertainty and scalability questions. Red Hat's Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) attempts to answer those trepidations positively.

"KVM is Red Hat's commercial competition for Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX/vSphere. Like the others, KVM is a full virtualization technology. Full virtualization means that virtual machines (VMs) built with KVM fully abstract computer hardware, so the operating systems that run inside the VMs "think" they're running on physical hardware. Memory, CPU, disk, peripherals, NICs and graphics adapters compose VMs using full virtualization technology.

"VM Security

"The first, and most heated, topic of discussion surrounding a move to virtual infrastructure is security. Unfortunately, virtualization and its husky sibling, cloud computing, have received demon status among tech observers and industry sideliners. Security is a major concern for anyone who runs a computing environment, whether it is physical or virtual. VMs are not less secure than physical machines; nor are they more secure. Their status as virtual doesn't alter their security in any way."

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