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Red Hat acquires Qumranet

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. The acquisition includes Qumranet’s virtualization solutions, including its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which together present a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers.

In addition, Qumranet’s talented team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, and its leaders of the open source community KVM project, will join Red Hat.

This acquisition advances Red Hat’s efforts to transform the virtualization market and drive comprehensive virtualization technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows. Red Hat can now deliver what virtualization-only vendors cannot: a comprehensive solution integrated with the operating system, which can drive down IT costs while simultaneously enhancing the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructure.

This acquisition adds to Red Hat’s differentiated and comprehensive solutions portfolio for the virtual enterprise, enhancing the opportunities for customers to improve the productivity and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure. Red Hat’s solution components include:

• The industry’s leading open source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with built-in virtualization.
• An embedded hypervisor which supports all major operating systems
• A consistent management platform for both virtual and physical systems, uniting servers, desktops, storage and networks
• A defining cloud and grid management solution
• Advanced, high-speed inter-application messaging
• High availability clustering solutions
• Integrated security infrastructure

The fact that Qumarnet has been acquired by Red Hat isn’t really all that surprising when one considers Red Hat’s previous statements about focusing heavily on KVM. It also tends to support the view that Red Hat, while remaining a partner with Citrix and the Xen community as a whole, wanted to control its own destiny a bit more closely.

With the addition of Qumranet’s technology, Red Hat will find itself in a position few other suppliers are in. They’ll have a powerful operating system, development environments, database software, virtualization technology of several types and access to a dynamic open source community. Only Oracle and Sun have a similar portfolio.

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What? Why VMware is better than Citrix Xen or Microsoft Hyper-V?

Personally, I’m using VMware ESX 3 and VMware ESX 3.5 and I have evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. But I have never try Citrix XenServer yet and I found VMware blog said why VMware is better here.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines - exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

In fact, I do agreed with VMware. I like simplicity of VMware Infrastructure Client, I like Virtual Center Centralized management, I like Update Manager and etc.

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