Due out this month, Fedora Core 5 will incorporate a more polished Xen hypervisor and support for Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD's Pacifica virtualization extensions.

Red Hat also said it will offer an integrated Xen hypervisor in the beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 slated for release this summer, with the final product due to ship at year’s end, company executives said Tuesday at an event in San Francisco.

In the interim, Red Hat plans to deliver a set of assessment, migration analysis and planning services for the RHEL 5 beta code this summer. The company said it also aims to launch a Virtualization Resource Center to provide customers with information about virtualization trends and how virtualization technology is moving forward.

Red Hat's Xen announcement was expected last week at Intel Developer Forum but was postphoned until this week. The Linux distributor’s support for Xen is no secret. News of Red Hat’s plans for Xen emerged in 2004, and the fourth version of Fedora Core supported an earlier, less mature Xen engine for developers.

Red Hat invited executives from Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and XenSource to discuss the key benefits of Xen virtualization on its Linux platform, notably increased utilization of servers; the ability to run Windows, Unix and legacy application workloads in virtual machines on the same server; and the ability to move around workloads in the event of a failure.

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