Ravello Systems raises $26M to build a cloud hypervisor for developers

In September 2008, Red Hat acquired the KVM hypervisor virtualization startup Qumranet for $107 million. The co-founders behind Qumranet’s open source virtualization technology, Benny Schnaider and Rami Tamir, have moved on and now return with a new startup called Ravello Systems. The duo’s new company aims to repeat the success that VMware has had with server virtualization in relation to the x86 server market and the data center. Only this time around, Schnaider and Tamir are looking to create a hypervisor technology that spans data centers and public clouds in order to easily bring enterprise applications into the cloud.

Ravello is calling its solution a cloud application hypervisor, and it’s built with a new high-performance nested hypervisor technology called HVX. The solution is initially being offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

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Coinciding with the company’s coming out of stealth mode last week, Ravello revealed it has successfully raised an additional $26 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The sizable investment is a testament to the company’s leadership team and their extensive experience in this field.

Ravello president and chairman Schnaider said in a statement that the company’s cloud application hypervisor “encapsulates multi-VM applications along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage, etc. so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes.”

A typical hypervisor like VMware or KVM is designed to run on a physical server. But HVX is designed to run inside a virtual machine. Ravello analyzes the application and normalizes it so that it is abstracted from the virtual machine it’s running on. By abstracting the application from the underlying VM that it’s running on, the application becomes more portable. The application no longer knows or cares whether it’s running on a VMware vSphere hypervisor or on an open source KVM hypervisor.

To make this happen, Ravello’s cloud application hypervisor is powered by three core technology components:

• A high-performance nested hypervisor, HVX, which is the engine behind Ravello’s ability to normalize application environments across any cloud without any changes
• An IO overlay that consists of software-defined networking and storage, enabling any networking topology on top of any cloud
• An application framework that enables a monolithic definition of an end-to-end multi-VM application, including all of its infrastructure

Unlike existing cloud management platforms, Ravello does not require modifications to the applications or VMs. This easy approach facilitates agile development and testing today, which is the first use-case scenario that the company is focusing on with its initial beta launch. In the future, the company’s technology may also make it easier for organizations to employ an approach to hybrid cloud computing known as “cloud bursting,” as well as disaster recovery and other on-demand use-cases that are ideal for the cloud.

In March of last year, Navin Thadani, who was in charge of the Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) product line, left to join Ravello as senior vice president in charge of products. Thadani says HVX allows developers to use the cloud more effectively and efficiently, thereby solving some of the biggest challenges of moving existing applications from the data center to the cloud, along with developing and deploying new applications in the cloud.

According to Thadani, Ravello is going after the cloud computing market in a different way. He claims everyone wants to do hybrid cloud, but goes on to say it really doesn’t work and organizations are not able to effectively use the cloud the way they want to today. He explains the challenge of moving existing applications in this way:

Today, existing applications that run in data centers assume a certain underlying infrastructure. That includes virtualization technology (usually VMware), networking configuration (static IPs, DHCP, DNS, multicast, etc.) and storage. Further, IT teams have developed deployment and management processes specific to their data centers. This inextricably ties an existing application to the data center because the cloud is completely different. In the cloud, organizations have to deal with changing IPs, instances that fail often, DNS names that may change and certain protocols like multicast and others that may not be supported. Hence, moving an existing application to the cloud is extremely difficult, and often requires a re-architecture or a re-write.

Thadani adds, “using Ravello, developers can take entire multi-VM applications running on VMware or KVM infrastructure in their data center — with multiple switches, routers, and firewalls — and deploy them with the click of a button in the cloud, without any changes or transformations.”

According to the company, once the application is in the cloud, developers can:

• Create multiple isolated instances so that each developer and tester can have a full multi-VM app instance exactly as it is in production
• Automatically spin up full multi-VM app instances for continuous integration, system and regression testing on every code check-in
• Snapshot complete multi-VM application instances for debugging or versioning/archiving
• Iteratively and collaboratively develop applications in the cloud

With Ravello’s seemingly virtualizing virtualization approach, there are some drawbacks — chief among them a performance lag. However, that could be why the initial beta release is targeting test and development environments. This group is typically more forgiving, often requesting agility over performance. Going down this route first should allow the company more time to perfect its new hypervisor technology for production use down the road.

Pricing hasn’t been announced yet; however, the company said it’s leaning toward an Amazon style usage-based pricing model.

The beta release currently supports Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and HP Cloud, but the company says it expects to expand that list later this year as the offering matures.

This article, “Ravello Systems raises $26M to build a cloud hypervisor for developers,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Marshall’s Virtualization Report blogand follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.