Red Hat plans expansion of virtualization products

Red Hat recently announced the upcoming release of four new products designed to bolster its position in the server virtualization market. Their hope is that more corporate users will see open source solutions as being robust enough for mission critical systems.

The product line will be made up of: Red Hat Enterprise Linux featuring KVM, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. Red Hat also announced that they will base all their future virtualization offerings on the KVM platform and that they will provide migration tools for IT organizations currently using Linux 5 Xen. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops is to be based on Qumranet's SolidICE.

This means added competition for main stream virtualization vendors, and -- very likely -- downward price pressure being placed on those companies. Now that most organizations have gotten past their healthy skepticism of open source-based solutions, I believe that this product launch will create significant disruption in the virtualization marketplace. Firms like H-P will have to work even harder to justify premium pricing with reliability and ease-of-management data.

Read the article at InformationWeek: Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Portfolio
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