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SolidICE

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

September 27, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Guest Posts, People, Rumors Tagged With: citrix, Oracle VM, qumranet, RedHat, SolidICE, xensource

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

September 4, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 5 Comments

According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Guest Posts, News, People Tagged With: kvm, qumranet, RedHat, SolidICE, virtualization, vmware, Xen

KVM Sponsor Qumranet Ships Solid ICE

May 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

KVM sponsor Qumranet launched (PDF) its long awaited desktop virtualization solution yesterday, just weeks before Citrix launches XenDesktop. Solid ICE (Independent Computing Environment) is a hosted desktop virtualization product that promises desktop-like performance with support for multiple monitors, bi-directional audio and video, streaming video and USB support.

Qumranet

From the press release:

By centrally hosting desktops in KVM on servers in the corporate data center, Solid ICE (Independent Computing Environment) gives IT administrators greater control over desktop image management, provisioning management, policy enforcement and security. Solid ICE also offers IT managers easier access to remote desktops to provide maintenance and support, as well as instant, inherent disaster recovery. In addition, businesses deploying a green IT strategy can achieve a savings of up to two thirds on electric power with Solid ICE.

The company said it prices the product by concurrent virtual machines, $200 per concurrent virtual machine which includes one monitor support and one SPICE display. Qumranet also offers a 30-day trial on its web site, although it seems to have messed up the spelling for the product name a bit 🙂

Solid ICE

[Source: ZDNet Blogs]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenDesktop, desktop virtualization, kvm, qumranet, Qumranet KVM, Qumranet Solid ICE, Qumranet SolidICE, solid ice, SolidICE, virtualisation, virtualization, XenDesktop

KVM Forum 2008 Schedule Has Been Announced

April 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The schedule for the upcoming KVM 2008 forum in Nappa, CA is up.

Qumranet, as the main KVM sponsor, is inviting all KVM developers to their second KVM summit on June 10 to 13th at the Marriot Napa Valley, California.

Many of the world’s top kernel developers will gather to discuss the state of the union on KVM and virtualization technology in general. More specifically, the group will plan the technology roadmap and future of KVM.

Avi Kivity will be keynoting, and off course Qumranet will also talk about KVM in Solid ICE. Apart from that, there will be a variety of presentations from Red Hat, IBM, Transitive and Intel representatives.

Gerd Hoffmann of Red Hat (SUSE in a previous role) will be talking about mixing Xen and KVM with xenner, which is a utility able to run Xen paravirtualized kernels as guests on Linux hosts, without the Xen hypervisor and using kvm instead.

Different IBM people will be discussing the state of KVM on Big Iron and PowerPC. And there will also be some talk about Open-ovf , an open source software project around the Open Virtual Appliance Format.

Stay tuned for more!

(Full disclosure: Virtualization.com is a media partner of the KVM Forum 2008)

Filed Under: Guest Posts Tagged With: IBM, intel, kvm, KVM Forum, KVM Forum 2008, KVM in Solid ICE, open-ovf, qumranet, red hat, solid ice, SolidICE, SUSE, Transitive, virtualisation, virtualization, Xen, xenner

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