oVirt

We were looking at the swirling rumors coming in about a potential acquisition of Red Hat by VMware, and ultimately decided not to cover the rumor because … well because it seems so irrational.

But is that actually so?

This is what BusinessWeek wrote:

Speculation is rife that the company (Red Hat) is a takeover target. “It makes no sense that they’re still hanging out there,” says Eric Gebaide, a managing director at investment bank Innovation Advisors.

One possible suitor is virtualization software company VMware, which some industry executives says is on the lookout for an operating system to add to its portfolio. Former VMware CEO Diane Greene, ousted by her board in July, had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Representatives of both companies declined to comment.

Ostatic followed up with a snapshot analysis, and now the folks over at Cnet News.com are trying to make sense of such an acquisition.

Ostatic concludes in its post:

A combination of VMware virtualization and a proven, popular operating system could pave the way for a future of healthy competition for VMware with other operating systems that bundle virtualization. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both VMware and Red Hat pursue all of this.

Meanwhile Cnet’s Matt Asay contradicts:

I would think this trend cuts the other way. Red Hat (and Novell) likely see virtualization’s commoditization as a reason to push the knife deeper into VMware. Being acquired by an important but commoditized feature of their operating systems doesn’t sound appealing to me…

What do you think?

VMware

Red Hat

Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.

What’s All This Talk About VMware Buying Red Hat?

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit