KVM is the Feather in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4

Red Hat announced Wednesday the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, a new major point update of the company’s popular commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces official support for KVM and marks an important milestone in Red Hat’s gradual transition away from Xen.

KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is an open source framework that brings native full virtualization to the Linux kernel. It is primarily designed for the x86 architecture (though others are supported) and takes advantage of processor virtualization extensions. It has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.20 and has become the favored virtualization solution of the upstream kernel community.