Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst On The Linux Vendor’s Virtualization Initiatives

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston this week for the annual Red Hat Summit, where a lot of announcements were made about Red Hat’s forray into virtualization. Whitehurst sat down with Network World’s Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat’s moves in virtualization, reports PC World.

This is the excerpt of the interview where they talk about virtualization:

The virtualization market is dominated by VMware, but you guys expanded your virtualization portfolio with a Linux-based hypervisor this week. What are your goals in virtualization?

Virtualization is half the operating system. Paul [Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies] would actually say virtualization is the operating system in a lot of ways. We feel pretty strongly virtualization needs to be pretty tightly integrated with the operating system.

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl.

We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

You talk about grid computing, cloud computing, whatever that is. The necessary enabler of that is Linux with integrated virtualization. Because otherwise what are you going to run on a cloud?

Read the rest of the interview on PC World.