"While VMware still dominates this nascent market, Red Hat sees the real competition coming from Microsoft and is positioning itself as the open-source alternative to Hyper-V. Red Hat claims that with the acquisition it can deliver a comprehensive solution integrated with the operating system, while virtualization-only vendors cannot.
"'It's a philosophical war as much as anything else,' Madden said. 'You have the bare-metal hypervisor approach, represented by VMware, versus the OS-dependent approach, favored by Microsoft. [And now Red Hat.] It's hardware versus software.'
"Much of the OS-dependent approach is premised on the idea that the hypervisor is quickly becoming a commodity. The opposing view, expressed in a recent conversation by VMware's Senior Product Marketing Manager, Leena Joshi, is that it's not the hypervisor, but the operating system, that is becoming a commodity."
