"Other virtualization products don't scale to support large numbers of cores or CPUs, which limit customers’ ability to utilize their infrastructure, or force customers to deploy multiple virtualization platforms," said Paul Cormier, EVP of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat, as the Raleigh, NC-based company this week released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 , with integrated virtualization.

"With Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, customers can easily deploy any application, anywhere at anytime," Cormier added.

According to Red Hat, whose CTO Brian Stevens on Tuesday will be keynoting on "The Future of the Virtual Enterprise" at Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco, RHEL 5.1 virtualization delivers considerably broader server support than proprietary virtualization products, and up to twice the performance. Notably, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 provides enhanced support for virtualization of Microsoft Windows guests, providing significant performance improvements for Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, 2003 and Windows 2008 beta guests.

"With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, customers enjoy a flexible yet consistent application environment for all of their virtualization requirements: from small servers to mainframe-class systems, for Linux and Windows servers and for even the most demanding workloads," said Cormier.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is immediately available to customers via Red Hat Network, Red Hat's management and automation platform. Red Hat Network provides customers a common platform for managing both physical and virtual servers, eliminating the need for organizations to acquire, manage and train their staff on new tools to manage virtual servers. Red Hat Network allows customers to provision, monitor and manage their servers throughout the entire lifecycle.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another, maximizing resource utilization in the face of changing business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes high-availability clustering, storage virtualization and failover software to provide enhanced levels of application availability, for both physical and virtual servers.