Industry Bigwigs Create Open Virtualization Alliance

BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE have announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualisation technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). The consortium will promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM, providing businesses improved choice, performance and price for virtualisation.

The Open Virtualization Alliance will provide education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their virtualisation options. The consortium complements the existing open source communities managing the development of the KVM hypervisor and associated management capabilities, which are rapidly driving technology innovations for customers virtualising both Linux and Windows applications.

KVM virtualisation provides compelling performance, scalability and security for today’s applications smoothing the path from single system deployments to large-scale cloud computing. As a core component in the Linux kernel, KVM leverages hardware virtualisation support built into Intel and AMD processors, providing a robust, efficient environment for hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines. KVM naturally leverages the rapid innovation of the Linux kernel (to virtualise both Linux and Windows guests), automatically benefiting from scheduler, memory management, power management, device driver and other features being produced by the thousands of developers in the Linux community.

Members of the Open Virtualization Alliance have a common interest in supporting open virtualisation, and are involved in the development, distribution, support, use, or other business interest in KVM or offerings which use it. By providing an open virtualisation alternative, they are offering their clients choice and enabling them to select the ideal virtualisation products for their business needs.

“BMC has designed its cloud solutions to promote interoperability and openness which would enable a broad set of choices for IT organisations,” said Kia Behnia, chief technology officer, BMC Software. “We are proud to support the goals of the Open Virtualization Alliance and extend its reach to the management of cloud environments that work for business.”

“Organisations are looking to quickly and easily manage change across the enterprise while maintaining control over IT resources,” said Paul Miller, vice president, Solutions and Strategic Alliances, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP. “Kernel Based Virtual Machines, supported by the Open Virtualization Alliance, offer organisations flexibility, choice and compatibility with HP Converged Infrastructure. They’re a great open source option for clients.”