Red Hat takes on VMware with server virtualization solution

Posted on November 7th, 2009 by Alejandro. Filed under Linux.

Red Hat expanded its virtualization product portfolio this week with the launch of its Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform. The company touts it as an end-to-end solution which includes management tools and a bare-metal standalone hypervisor that can run both Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

Red Hat aimed to become a major player in the virtualization market last year when it acquired Qumranet, the company behind the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). Following the acquisition, Red Hat began transitioning its virtualization strategy towards KVM and away from Citrix’s Xen. KVM has strong backing from the upstream Linux kernel development community, making it a natural choice for Red Hat. The company has invested considerable resources to boost KVM’s capabilities and has built robust management tools around the technology. KVM was practically the centerpiece in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which was officially released in September.