Nov. 3, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the newest product set in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is designed to enable pervasive adoption of virtualization, with a comprehensive end-to-end solution combining a standalone hypervisor and powerful virtualization management.

In February 2009, Red Hat announced plans to deliver the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, building on its leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system platform, offering the proven security, performance, scalability and cost advantages of open source virtualization technology. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers entered a worldwide beta in June 2009. Extensive collaboration with large enterprise beta customers, such as Comviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom, resulted in enhanced product capabilities designed to meet enterprise requirements for deploying and managing heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.

"As a participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we recognized expanded performance, security and scalability benefits for our systems. We look forward to continuing our technology collaboration with Red Hat and plan to deploy new virtualized workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization going forward,” said Amarendra Kumar Singh, vice president, CAG, DPM, ISS and IT at Comviva.

“As an active participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we recognized expanded performance and scalability benefits for our thousands of virtualized systems," said Patrick Pulvermüller, managing director at Host Europe. "After comparing the industry's leading virtualization solutions, we are planning to use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the foundation for our cloud servers to leverage the powerful combination of Red Hat's next-generation KVM virtualization technology and Red Hat's new server virtualization management tools. We look forward to continuing our long-time technology collaboration with Red Hat through joint work on our cloud and virtualization deployments.”

"With our participation in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we have experienced the impressive agility, scalability and performance benefits of Red Hat's virtualization solutions," said Masato Minamisawa, Executive Manager of IP Technology Department, Business Network Services Division at NTT Communications. "We recognize the unique technological advantages of KVM at the heart of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and look forward to continued collaboration around virtualization and cloud computing with Red Hat."

“Since Qualcomm implemented the 5.0 release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided us with cost savings and efficiencies in Linux virtualization,” said Dave Costakos, IT Architect at Qualcomm. “With the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, Qualcomm can leverage enterprise-class virtualization management features with low-cost open source virtualization.”

As an advanced virtualization user, Swisscom IT Services has leveraged a variety of virtualization offerings on the market, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization. With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Swisscom IT Services gains an expanded Red Hat virtualization solution that breaks down the company's virtualization barriers and challenges.

"Building on our long-term use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, we have been an active participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program," said Heinz Többen, head of division transformation, architectures and projects of Swisscom IT Services. "With the high levels of performance, security and scalability that we've achieved with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat's virtualization technology is a strategic addition to our IT infrastructure and excellent value of money."

In September 2009, Red Hat delivered the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which offers next-generation Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.

Today, Red Hat delivers the next phase of the portfolio with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes the following components:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor:

A standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor designed to host Linux and Microsoft Windows virtual servers and desktops. It provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments and other highly dynamic IT environments. Using KVM technology, the hypervisor provides high performance and security coupled with memory sharing technology, which permits more efficient guest consolidation, and enterprise features such as live migration.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers:

A platform for configuring, provisioning, managing and organizing virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.