KVM vs. Xen vs. VMware. Is it a Hypervisor War? - Page 2

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Novell supports KVM, to a point

Red Hat isn't the only Linux vendor backing KVM though, Novell is also a contributor to the KVM project and KVM is already part of openSUSE. Novell spokesperson Ian Bruce noted that Novell will continue to work with the Linux kernel and KVM community, and provide maintenance for the open source KVM community project. That said, Novell does have some concerns.

"We see KVM as an interesting developing technology," Bruce told InternetNews.com. "However, today KVM is still in the first stage of development and does not yet provide the same scalability, security, availability as well as the interoperability of the Xen hypervisor. KVM has not gone through the enterprise enablement and enterprise testing necessary to provide a support statement from Novell."

Bruce also noted that KVM relies on strong CPU performance with very limited support for para-virtualization. As such Bruce argued that it is difficult to achieve top performance in a KVM virtualized environment without powerful hardware underneath. Conversely in his view, Xen offers strong support for para-virtualization for modified Windows guests and modified Linux guests to achieve near-native performance.

Sun has a different take

Beyond just Novell and Red Hat, Xen is also a strategic technology for Oracle as well as Sun. Oracle was unavailable for comment about the impact that KVM may have on its business.

Sun, however, isn't concerned. Vijay Sarathy, senior director of marketing, Sun xVM told InternetNews.com that KVM is only relevant to Linux.

"Sun's virtualization strategy is more heterogeneous and Xen's architecture is more suited to that end," Sarathy explained. "For example, with our xVM Server, a type 1 hypervisor, we have been able to integrate the Xen hypervisor with OpenSolaris in dom0 to enable Windows, Linux and Solaris guests to take advantage of the combined benefits."

Red Hat's KVM will also eventually compete against offerings from VMware as well. Red Hat and VMware are also partners, which is something that is not expected to change by VMware as a result of Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet.

Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware, told InternetNews.com that VMware has actually also worked with KVM on virtual machine disk formats and will continue to do so. However, Chu argues that the underlying operating system is not the key to hypervisor market success.

"Customers have been clear that they want an optimized thin virtualization layer that supports all of their environments, regardless of OS or application vendor," Chu said. "As opposed to having silos for each operating system or having a hypervisor that is built on a general purpose OS that has to been taken down every time they patch the operating system. Having a bare metal hypervisor like ESX which is optimized for all the major operating systems and application environments is what the market wants."