Yesterday’s announcement that a group of company’s led by Red Hat, IBM, HP and others have formed the Open Virtualization Alliance had bloggers, analysts and others in the twittersphere talking. The announcement, which was made at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, also included founding members Intel, BMC Software, SUSE and Eucalyptus Systems. According to the Alliance the goal is to foster the adoption of virtualization technologies and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in particular. But speculation ran high after the announcement that some member companies may be attempting to break the stranglehold VMWare and Citrix hold on the market while other members may be hedging their bets.
In his Blog today Dave Courbanou wrote:
It’s more probable that the participating companies are simply trying to stave off the proliferation of proprietary VMware installations. Indeed, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a multi-vendor approach to virtualization — in the past, we’ve covered Cisco and BMC’s efforts to create a cloud computing initiative and the creation of the VDI Coalition by Xiotech, Vistro and Pano Logics.
Industry Analyst Peter O’Kelley wrote:
Some challenging market dynamics for VMware (and Citrix). Some of tech's biggest names are standing up to VMware, creating an industry group meant to accelerate the adoption of an open-source virtualization stack built atop the KVM hypervisor.
Rakesh Dogra wrote in the DataCenter Journal:
The other fallout of this alliance is also the fact that these leading companies have chosen to “ignore” Xen hypervisor and choose KVM instead. They are looking at driving the open alternative to VMware and foster the adoption of cloud infrastructure which is based on open source.
KVM is an open-source virtual machine implementation licensed under GNU that uses the operating systems’s kernel, potentially offering greater performance. Linux kernel 2.6.20 was the first to include KVM and numerous guest operating systems work with it.
As cloud computing takes center stage, virtualization becomes important and is a key feature in VMWare’s vSphere. Up until recently, KVM has not been considered an enterprise-class solution. But according to the OVA, there have been performance, scalability and security improvements that enable it to compete in the enterprise market. The OVA will not define APIs but will formalize the usage of APIs and provide guidelines for API usage by third-party developers. Likewise, the OVA will not produce products or offer solutions.