Red Hat, Citrix release new virtualisation products

Red Hat has moved its enterprise virtualisation products into a beta it says is already oversubscribed.

The suite, which includes a standalone hypervisor with server and desktop virtualisation management software, is on track for delivery later this year.

It builds on virtualisation technology in the Red Hat enterprise Linux operating system, the company said.

"It is encouraging to see Red Hat advancing its virtualisation technology with this beta announcement," said IDC research manager for enterprise virtualisation software, Gary Chen.

"After seeing an early demo of the management platform it is clear that Red Hat is focused on offering customers more virtualisation capabilities."

New Citrix release

In other virtualisation news, Citrix today announced its XenServer 5.5 platform.

The free XenServer platform includes centralised multi-node management, storage and full live motion.

XenServer 5.5 adds consolidated backup, enhanced conversion and search tools, Active Directory integration and expanded guest support for virtually every version of Windows and Linux operating systems, the vendor said.

Citrix said the latest 5.5 release has functionality associated with a price tag of US$5000 ($6321) a server from other leading virtualisation products.

On the desktop...

On the desktop side, Codeweavers released CrossOver Mac 8.0 and CrossOver Linux 8.0.

Both versions support Internet Explorer 7, Quicken 2009 and performance upgrades for Microsoft Office 2007, particularly Outlook.

"Delivering Mac and Linux users support for Internet Explorer 7 and Quicken 2009 is a major development," said Codeweavers' founder and chief executive officer Jeremy White.

"Along with adding support for these applications, CrossOver 8.0 contains significant performance upgrades for Microsoft Office 2007, most notably Outlook. You can install service pack one and users that have very large offline data files will see noticeable speed increases."