Fedora 11: Virtualization Enhancements

Advancements and enhancements are being made every day in many key areas of virtualization technologies. The Fedora Project is on the cutting edge and Fedora 11 showcases recent enhancements to virtualization technology that focus in on management, performance and security.

Fedora 11 includes many new features, one of which is a redesign of ‘virt-manager’; an end-to-end desktop UI for managing virtual machines. The ‘virt-manager’ feature allows the user to focus more on managing virtual machines and less on the backend, no matter what type of virtualization technology they are using. The new features within “virt-manager” include:

• a new VM creation wizard,

• improved support for host-to-host migration of VMs,

• an interface for physical device assignment for existing VMs, easing allocation of physical resources tied to VMs,

• an upgraded statistics display that shows fine grained disk and network I/O stats, and

• improved VNC authentication to connect to VMs, which allow clients to securely connect to remote VMs.

You can learn more about this innovative new tool at http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/.

Also in Fedora’s latest release is a sneak peak at some functional improvements to the Kernal Virtual Machine (KVM) that aim to set the performance bar higher for virtualized environments. You can read more about Fedora’s virtualization enhancements here.

And you’ll see how integration of SELinux with the virtualization stack via sVirt provides enhanced security. Virtual machines can now effectively run isolated from the host and one another, making it harder for security flaws to be exploited in the hypervisor by malicious guests. You can read more about sVirt here.

Fedora 11 continues to set the pace in showcasing the future of virtualization technology, and offers a compelling glimpse into the security, performance and stability of what could find its way into future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To check out KVM, sVirt, Virt Manager or any other of Fedora’s cutting edge virtualization technologies download a copy of Fedora 11 today from http://get.fedoraproject.org.