Red Hat Gets Serious About Virtualization

“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.”

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