Red Hat Enters the Virtualization Race

As virtualization technology becomes more pervasive and starts to make its way into the operating system, it seems that more and more vendors want to get their slice of this particular pie. Now Linux vendor Red Hat has joined the fray, announcing its own embedded hypervisor at its annual user conference.

The new software, oVirt, bills itself as "the next step in open virtual machine management." It "provides both a small image that runs on a host and provides virtualization services to VMs there, and also a web-based management console that lets you allocate and group hosts and storage, install and remove virtual machines, [and] level resources across a large group of machines." oVirt's image is a stateless Fedora system, and the project is based on the KVM project, which is part of the Linux kernel.

Red Hat says the integration with KVM makes oVirt superior to the currently-leading open source virtualization solution, Citrix's Xen. With Microsoft planning to roll out HyperV as a part of Windows, and VMware already firmly entrenched in the enterprise virtualization space, they're going to have a tough sell here. Presumably oVirt will offer tight integration with Red Hat's own Linux releases, but it remains to be seen whether it can gain any traction outside of the company.