If you’re looking to get more information about what Red Hat can offer you in the virtualization space, we’ve been hosting a virtualization webinar series so that our customers, partners and anyone else that’s interested can hear about our capabilities straight from our product experts. The most recent webinars provided more information about high-availability infrastructures and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 database virtualization performance. We invite you to watch them to learn more.

Our webinar on December 12 was hosted by Andrew Cathrow, a Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat. It featured information on “Building a high-availability infrastructure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle.” A focus was placed on the powerful new features incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, including server virtualization, storage virtualization, high availability, load balancing and clustering. Watch the webinar to learn about how you can drive costs our of business and deliver a scalable and highly available infrastructure using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We also hosted a webinar in early January during which John Shakshober, a Senior Software Engineer, and Nick Carr, a Product Marketing Director, spoke on “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Database Virtualization Performance.” They highlighted some of the results that Red Hat’s performance engineering group has been achieving during testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization with several database products. This performance group does extensive testing during the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux - the results are used to drive future development work and are often shared with customers by sales and support people. In many cases, testing and development is done in collaboration with Red Hat’s OEM and chip-vendor partners. The results are rarely audited by an independent benchmarking organization, but they are taken very seriously by Red Hat engineering - inflating the results would render them useless to us, so don’t worry, they’re on target. Separately, Red Hat works closely with its partners to created fully audited benchmark results using released products.

Watch this webinar to learn more about the performance of a number of virtualization scenarios - including paravirtualization, full virtualization, the use of paravirtualized device drivers with fully virtualized guests, and the benefits of new hardware features such as Nested Page Tables. Typically, customers are interested in achieving performance that is as close to their non-virtualized environments as possible, so the presentation shows the overhead associated with multiple deployment styles. The tests used are very demanding, reflecting worst-case situations. Nevertheless, the webinar shows that paravirtualized environments achieve performance that is within a few percent of non-virtualized environments. The goal of Red Hat’s performance team is that virtualization overhead should never exceed 20 percent for these very intensive workloads, regardless of deployment style.

To take the virtualization product tour, read the whitepaper or learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux Virtualization, visit here.