Red Hat's new chief technology officer, Brian Stevens, has announced that server virtualisation and a new stateless form of Linux will be the key technologies in Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, due in spring. The news was cautiously welcomed by analysts.

The stateless Linux project is sponsored by Red Hat and designed to centralise all the customisation of a computer's software environment - for example by booting the system from a read-only network drive and storing all user data on another centrally managed writable drive. This would enable IT administrators to deploy and repair systems more easily.

Stevens said companies currently have individual images for various applications, such as images for web servers and databases. "The idea behind Stateless Linux is to take the thousands of images and reduce them down to just one image," he said.
Stevens also promised to deliver the benefits of the Xen open-source server virtualisation tools in RHEL 5. The Xen project has been gathering momentum over the last few years and is set to take a significant step forward once Intel's VT and AMD's Pacifica hardware-assisted virtualisation technologies are available in high-volume servers next year.

In particular, Pacifica and VT work with Xen to enable closed-source operating systems such as Windows and Solaris to be virtualised by the Xen virtual machine monitor.

Stevens said that Red Hat will use Xen to drive processor utilisation to as high as 80 percent. "Many firms have datacentres running at maximum power, but on average those datacentres run at only 15 percent processor utilisation," said Stevens, who added that a future management system could allocate unused CPU capacity to virtual machines to increase CPU utilisation.

"Firms could use Xen virtualisation to avoid building another datacentre," Stevens added. He said his vision of the future included setting a service level agreement (SLA) for each virtualised server environment so that it could be monitored and managed automatically.

Nathaniel Martinez of analyst firm IDC, said, "These moves reflect the mood of the market, which is all about server management and virtualisation. [Red Hat is] absolutely right to head in that direction but I would like to see some- thing more tangible."

Stevens was in Europe briefing analysts and key customers of Red Hat's roadmap for introducing new technologies into its enterprise product line next year.