by
Gabe Knuth
We got to take a look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops at BriForum a few weeks ago, but they saved the release of the product for their own Red Hat Summit event last week. As you probably know, this is the long anticipated re-release of the SolidICE product that Red Hat acquired from Qumranet in 2008. RHEV for Desktops uses the KVM hypervisor that is built in to the Linux kernel combined with their SPICE protocol to deliver a high quality user experience.
Brian and I did a side-by-side comparison before the acquisition, and we learned that SPICE had some advantages over the competition, along with some drawbacks, like being tied to a specific hypervisor (see Brian's article on remote protocol hypervisor integration). Now that Red Hat has had over 18 months to enhance the product, we'll be getting it up in the lab soon to see what's changed. Keep your eye out over the next month or so for a look at the management and protocol capabilities.
Reader Scott Dowdle (who I consider to be our open-source watchdog, making sure nothing on that front gets by us :) sent in a few details related to the desktop product that we might have overlooked:
1) The RHEV-Management app now runs on Microsoft Windows 2008 Server R2 rather than 2003 as 2.1 did
2) They have added a V2V conversion tool that can convert from ESX, RHEL Xen, and RHEL KVM to RHEL KVM and RHEV
3) The underlying technology for V2V is libguestfs, which is a library that has bindings for many different programming languages to access VM disk images and interact with them in a variety of ways. Some of them work while the VM is running, and others work while the VM is powered down. Various command line apps are available that use libguestfs including guestfish, and many virt-{something} commands.
4) They showed an early version of a GUI application that uses libguestfs
(Chetan Venkatesh added a comment below that describes how you can use libguestfs)
Licensing boils down to two different licenses (which are really maintenance packages) that must be purchased. First, you're required to have RHEV for Servers licenses on each host system. Then, you'll have to purchase the appropriate number of RHEV for Desktops 25-user license packs. Desktop licenses are concurrent, though, so many companies will be happy with that.
Two "starter packages" are available, and each includes six sockets of RHEV for Servers and 100 RHEV for Desktops licenses. The difference in pricing is based on what support level you need. 12x5 support runs US$4,494, and 24x7 support runs US$6,744. Since these are actually maintenance contracts, this cost is per year.
Based on the costs of RHEV for Servers (here), which are $499/yr for 12x5 support and $749/yr for 24x7 support, we can get a good idea of what the 25-user packs will cost. Using 12x5 support as an example, we see that $2994 of that is for RHEV for Servers ($499 x 6), which leaves $1500 for 100 desktops, or $15/desktop/yr. The same math on the 24x7 package results in a cost of $22.50/desktop/year. So, a 25-user license pack would cost either $375 or $562, depending on the level of support.
Since we're not fans of generalized VDI cost models, it's not really worth the time to plug these numbers into any to see how it comes out. I'm curious to see what these costs would amount to if they were placed into an actual environment, though. So, if you'd like to weigh in on how this would affect your organization, please post your thoughts and findings in the comments.
We're still trying to put together the plans for our next Geek Week, and a protocol shootout between HDX, RDP (with and without RemoteFX), SPICE, and EOP is one of the options. If you'd like to see that (or something else, for that matter), let us know.
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