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Red Hat Makes Strategic Virtualization Buy

By: Keith Ward

9/8/2008

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Open source server distributor Red Hat Inc., which is carving out a virtualization path unique in the industry, added another arrow to its quiver Thursday with the acquisition of Qumranet Inc.

Red Hat paid $107 million for privately held Qumranet, according to a Red Hat press release. With that sum, Red Hat gets Qumranet's two primary offerings: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and SolidICE, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product. It gives Red Hat a more complete virtualization solution and foothold in the growing VDI market, seen by many as the next lucrative frontier in the virtualization space.

KVM is a "Type II" or hosted hypervisor, meaning it sits on top of an existing operating system--in this case, open source Linux. Using this technology, anyone using Linux has access to a hypervisor and can perform virtualization. The Xen hypervisor also works with Linux and other operating systems. The difference is that Xen is a "Type I," or bare metal, hypervisor. It sits directly on hardware and handles virtualization, whereas KVM sits on top of Linux, and processing has to go through the OS first. Type II hypervisors are generally seen as being faster than Type I hypervisors, which have an extra layer of software to navigate.

Qumranet's rationale is that KVM doesn't need to duplicate functionality already built into Linux. That approach makes KVM a lean, fast program in its own right. Red Hat agreed, and decided to move away from Xen and into the KVM camp last June, when it announced the Embedded Linux Hypervisor, which contained KVM rather than Xen. Red Hat's move surprised many in the virtualization and open source communities, since Xen is highly regarded and used in offerings from companies such as Virtual Iron, Novell, Citrix, Oracle and others.

SolidICE, on the other hand, is a proprietary, commercial VDI product. Currently, it supports only Windows XP and Windows 2000 desktops. VDI creates a virtual machine (VM) of a user's desktop, including the operating system and applications. The VM is then stored on a server in a datacenter, and accessed by the user via a remote protocol--either Microsoft's remote desktop protocol (RDP) or SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments), Qumranet's specialized protocol that the company says enhances the end user experience.