Today Red Hat announced the release of its much anticipated product, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. This product includes two components: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (aka RHEVM) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers (RHEV-M), the product for managing your virtual infrastructure. As a sidenote, Redhat’s other virtualization product called Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops still remains in private beta today and is expected to be released in early 2010.

Pricing

As hinted earlier by Red Hat , this new product is available as a new subscription separate and apart from the enterprise server subscription. Yes, this mean you’ll have to shell out some more dollars for this even if you already have one for enterprise linux. In Addition to this there’s also a separate subscription for virtual guests. Coming up with a pricing scheme is new territory for Redhat which is why the supporting URLs provides all kinds of documentation and flash demos on pricing. A standard subscription priced per managed socket for x86 servers is $499 per year, $100 more than the standard subscription for redhat enterprise linux. Additionally there are also separate costs for Virtual Guests. There’s a pricing for Redhat enterprise linux guest and separate pricing scheme for Windows Server Guest Licensing Cost. If you are a larger organization and don’t want any limitations, you can opt for the advanced platform which provides unlimited guests and socket support for a yearly subscription price of $1499.

Additional Resources

The following url provides the starting point for information on this latest product.
http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev

Flash demo introducing the new product
http://www.redhat.com/v/swf/rhev/demo.html

Flash demo on creating a virtual machine with the new management tool
https://www.redhat.com/v/swf/redhat_ss_createvm.html

Flash Demo on the Maintenance Manager
https://www.redhat.com/v/swf/redhat_ss_maintenance.html

Flash Demo on System Scheduler
https://www.redhat.com/v/swf/redhat_ss_scheduler.html

I’ve also listed some documents below from Redhat’s website for a first look at pricing options.