COMPUTING: Virtualisation

[Kyuuketsuki]

OK,

So I was looking at RHEV (RedHat Enterprise Virtualisation) and it is obviously commercially oriented (no free download, just trial) so I just watched the video and picked up on a couple of things, notably something called KVM. RedHat split into RH & Fedora some time ago with Fedora being the true opensource part but being used almost as a testing ground for the RH's commercial stuff so I looked at the latest Fedora and sure enough there's KVM and QEMU which have been combined to form a simpler (more straightforward) virtualisation package.

Anyone know anything about this? Is it just a RedHat thing or common on many Linux Distro's ... I prefer bare-metal virtualisation but obviously bare-metal is just another way of saying we've combined the virtualisation and host OS to make something not quite as flexible as an OS and virtual server application (sort of). If I was to choose the distro I wanted it would be SuSE (I'm a bit of a sucker for it) so I was wondering if RH are doing something special (do lots of distro's have this stuff in them?) or just claiming they are?

Also, if I went with this kind of virtualisation would I have a decent VM management system (like Xen & ViClient?

EDIT: Oh yeah, I've installed MS Hyper-V but so far am not impressed simply because it doesn't appear to support much in the way of Linux (only SuSE) which kinda invalidates one of the uses I planned for virtualisation (learning about MS stuff but also Linux stuff, not only SuSE). So far it looks like ESXi is still the best.

Kyu