Big News in Virtualization - Red Hat aquires KVM inventor, maintainer Qumranet

Posted by on September 4, 2008 under Uncategorized |

Red Hat announced today the acquisition of Qumranet, the inventor and maintainer of KVM:  http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/

Red Hat has been involved with the ongoing efforts to develop and maintain KVM.  I think this will give additional focus, resources, and credibility to the KVM project.  Red Hat’s virtual management project, oVirt will probably pick up the pace as well.

So long as Red Hat keeps development of KVM as free and open-source, this should be a big plus.  I don’t know why they wouldn’t.

It’s been clear to me for over a year now that KVM was the future of virtualization, that VMWare and Xen would fade as the Hypervisor becomes a commodity.  Ubuntu moving to KVM as it’s primary platform for virtualization was the first validation, and now Red Hat.  KVM already has a broader set of capabilities than ESX and Xen.  It’ll blow the doors off of virtualization with the upcoming PCI passthrough capabilties (more news on that to follow).

I’ll keep you apprised of what I see going on in the developer community for KVM