A lot can happen in just a few short years. Despite its favored status among Linux players like IBM and Red Hat, the Xen hypervisor has since taken a back seat for both, as the two have become major backers behind KVM virtualization instead. What does the change mean for Xen customers of IBM’s? ServerWatch takes a look.
Five years ago, the open source Xen hypervisor was the primary technology that big vendors like IBM and Red Hat were adopting and pushing. In 2010, that’s no longer the case as the rival KVM effort is now getting the attention of both IBM and Red Hat, as well as many others in the Linux ecosystem.
Mike Day, chief virtualization architect at IBM, determined the top four contributors to KVM as measured by activity on the development mailing list. In first place is Red Hat, with 9,471 messages out of a total 18,303 messages, representing nearly 52 percent of list traffic for 2009.
Red Hat isn’t the only group active in KVM development, though. Day’s list put IBM in the No. 2 spot with 1,382 messages or 8 percent of the KVM developer list traffic. Novell and Intel round out the list with approximately 5 percent each.
