We’re nearing the release of oVirt 3.3, and I’ve been testing out all the new features — and using oVirt to do it, courtesy of nested KVM. KVM takes advantage of virtualization-enabling hardware extensions that most recent processors provide. Nested KVM enables KVM hypervisors to make these extensions available to their guest instances. Nested KVM typically takes takes a bit of configuration to get up and running: on the host side, you need to make sure that nested virtualization is enabled, and…

Last week, I attended my first OpenStack Summit as part of a team from Red Hat helping to launch a new community distribution of the popular open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) project. I came away from the Summit impressed with the size and velocity of OpenStack. The conference drew some 3000 users, developers, and members of the vendor community, roughly twice the draw from the previous Summit. What’s more, several of OpenStack’s component sub-projects reported a doubling in…

GNOME Shell represents a new desktop approach intended to make applications easier to access, limit workspace distractions and make more use of modern desktop and notebook hardware. Canonical, for its part, has broken ranks with GNOME by opting to not participate in GNOME Shell, instead developing for Ubuntu a separate interface, called “Unity.” Unity is rooted in many of the same components and designed with many of the same goals as GNOME, albeit with different implementation details. Read my review…

Novell’s SUSE Manager 1.2 provides users of the company’s line of enterprise-oriented, Linux-based operating systems with a server management tool built from the ground up with Linux in mind. SUSE Manager, which began shipping in March, is based on Spacewalk 1.3, an open-source project born out of Red Hat’s own server management product, Satellite, the code for which Red Hat freed in 2008. I tested SUSE Manager 1.2 with servers running SLES 11 SP1 and with RHEL 6, using the…

As a speedy, modern, cross-platform Web browser, Firefox 4 is well worth evaluating for any organization, particularly those with a heterogeneous mix of client operating systems. On this multiplatform front, however, organizations should also keep an eye on Google’s Chrome, which tends to match Firefox in features and performance, and offers Group Policy-based management support that Firefox 4 lacks. For those already running earlier versions of Firefox, version 4 will be well worth the upgrade—provided that any add-ons on which…

BitNami Cloud Hosting service combines its catalog of integrated open-source Web-application stacks with Amazon Web Services features. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Organizations with compute capacity to spare can sell it to buyers looking to the cloud to perform short-term compute tasks at lower costs. Read my full review at eweek.com.

This latest release, which is also known by the Toy Story-inspired name “Squeeze,” will play well in server deployments that draw on open-source components, which the Debian project has a knack for packaging up for easy installation over one of the project’s repository mirror sites. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Tasktop Pro 1.8 stitches together application-lifecycle-management systems with the Web-browsing, document, calendar and e-mail activities that form the context of a specific task. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Convirture’s vCenter workalike builds on the virtualization foundation offered by Linux server operating systems such as those from Red Hat and Ubuntu, with an easy-to-use Web-based management interface and separate open source and enterprise product options. Read my full review at eweek.com.