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Red Hat Goes Virtual

The greatest virtualization company you've probably never heard of is now part of Red Hat.

Qumranet was unknown to me before Redmond magazine Editor Ed Scannell did an interview with its CEO. I found out from Ed (and CEO Benny Schnaider) that Qumranet has an open source Type 2 hypervisor. That means the hypervisor runs on top of an OS (in this case Linux) and the OS runs against the processor.

Red Hat, which paid just north of $100 million for Qumranet, is now hoping to push this hypervisor, called KVM, as the primary solution for Linux. With Red Hat's muscle and Xen owner Citrix's love of Hyper-V, Red Hat might just get its way.

Red Hat also gets a commercial desktop virtualization product out of the deal. There are quite a few of those in the market already.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 09, 2008


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