Red Hat Gets Legit in Virt Space?

Paula Rooney at ZDNet says that Red Hat, with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, is a "bona fide virtualization vendor." That's because of the built-in KVM hypervisor.

That's true, but it's also only part of the story. The bigger question is whether third-party vendors will build on top of it, creating a sustainable ecosystem. Right now, very few companies are making products that work with KVM. That's not to say it's a bad hypervisor; quite the opposite. But how many admins want to support another hypervisor, and how many third-party vendors want to port their virtualization products to another platform? That's the big question.

As I reported in an earlier story, some analysts aren't quite so bullish on KVM's ability to gain traction in the market. Others say there's an opportunity to differentiate itself with KVM. I imagine the initial uptake will be with the Linux crowd; those who want to compare performance/functionality to Xen, the former hypervisor that shipped with Linux. But unless vendors develop for it, it's hard to see it going beyond those narrow boundaries.

What do you think? Are you considering RHEL 5.4, specifically for the KVM hypervisor? Would you consider it? Let me know at [email protected].

Posted by Keith Ward on 09/09/2009 at 12:48 PM