oVirt Project gains support

MUMBAI, INDIA: The oVirt project announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

The oVirt project was formed to deliver and establish a development community around an integrated virtualization platform that offers advanced virtualization management capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler and more.

With this project, Red Hat has open sourced its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management technology. The project combines the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management technology code with established open technologies, including KVM, the oVirt node for running virtual machines and virtualization tools such as libvirt and v2v.

oVirt aims to deliver both a cohesive stack and discretely reusable components for open virtualization management, and to improve key building blocks for private and public cloud

deployments.

The oVirt project comes on the heels of the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance in May 2011 to foster the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative.

Mark Baker, server product manager at Canonical comments, "It is important for us to be involved in the oVirt project, which enables users to more easily deploy virtualized solutions using open source software. Having a robust management stack around KVM is key to enabling organizations to use open source virtualization solutions in their datacenters. Increasing the number of enterprise-class virtualization solutions available can only be a

good thing for the industry."