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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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