Open Virtualization Alliance

Eucalyptus Systems, BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC), HP (NYSE:HPQ) , IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (NYSE: INTC), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and SUSE recently announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization 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 virtualization technology.

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

We know that KVM virtualization 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 virtualization 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 visualize 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 group.

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