Top vendors drive open source virtualisation

Several big IT vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software, Intel and Red Hat, are banding together to promote an open source virtualisation platform, reports Computer World.

The vendors formed the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA) to develop reference architectures and best practices for a technology that, according to Gartner, has less than half of 1% of market share.

Their goal is try to get enterprises to consider kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) as an alternative to VMware's platform, as well as to encourage developer support.

The Register says OVA's objective is to raise the profile of KVM and encourage software partners to build tools that make KVM more than just a commodity hypervisor and to help improve the overall management and deployment of applications on KVM.

Red Hat believes the alliance will have no problem attracting small software partners because the member companies won't compete with them or take their business.

Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM for Red Hat's cloud computing business unit, says: “VMware is following a strategy that Microsoft did, of create a big ecosystem, take over what's hot, and put the smaller vendor out of business.

“What we are offering is an open environment and a level playing field, and it's an emerging market where you are not going to have a company that wants to own everything.”

CBR Online states earlier this month, Red Hat and IBM collaborated to make products and offerings based on KVM technology, an open virtualisation choice for the enterprise.

Director of Linux at IBM Jean Staten says: “The recent enhancements to the security, reliability and performance of KVM have made it a compelling choice for enterprises looking for the flexibility of an open standards-based virtualisation option.”