The Evolution of Virtualization: Qumranet joins Red Hat.

Red Hat has acquired 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. The acquisition provides three primary benefits:

1. Accelerate time to market for these next-generation virtualization solutions
2. Increase our investment in and governance of core open source virtualization technology, and
3. Acquire industry-recognized desktop virtualization technology, to offer into a green-field market

We deliver, and are expanding, a set of virtualization solutions, including management, provisioning, migration, high availability, virtual appliances, servers, and storage. With Qumranet, we acquire some key technology components which accelerate this development, enabling more companies to use virtualization, more cost-effectively, without additional overhead or complexity.

Qumranet is the inventor and key maintainer of KVM, the only virtualization technology that is fully incorporated into the Linux kernel. Red Hat views KVM as the next generation of virtualization technology -- it combines support for the latest hardware virtualization capabilities and the rapid feature development of the Linux kernel into a complete, highly functional, virtualization platform. Red Hat believes that a strong coupling between the hypervisor and the kernel is a major advantage.

Qumranet also developed SolidICE, a high-performance, scalable, desktop virtualization solution built specifically for virtual desktops, not simply a retrofit from server virtualization solutions. SolidICE is designed to enable a user's Windows or Linux desktop to run in a virtual machine that is hosted on a central server. It is based on the industry-leading Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) protocol, which overcomes key barriers to VDI adoption, including a superior user experience enabled by the SPICE protocol capabilities. SolidICE offers superiority over competition in three aspects:

• A user experience indistinguishable from a physical PC (Windows and Linux desktops) via the SPICE remote rendering technology
• 3-5x cost-performance improvement over retrofitted server virtualization solutions
• Scalable, purpose-built management

For more information, please see the related whitepapers: http://www.qumranet.com/products-and-solutions/solid-ice-white-papers and videos: http://www.qumranet.com/products-and-solutions/video-library.

Yes. Red Hat will support Xen until at least 2014 (seven years after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5). We are committed to insulating our customers from changes in the infrastructure components and this is why we created an open virtualization management standard (the Libvirt API). This standard is provided in Red Hat products and has been adopted by a number of other vendors (Sun, Novell, Ubuntu, etc.). It allows customers and ISVs to build virtualization management applications, processes and configurations based on a stable API, independent of the underlying virtualization technology.

Red Hat continues to be an active member of the Xen development community and is currently working on further integration work between the Xen hypervisor and the Linux kernel.

Yes. As mentioned above we believe that KVM offers the next generation of virtualization technology, so we wish to offer it to our Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers. However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will continue to implement Xen and no decision on timing for the transition from Xen to KVM has been made. Note that the recently announced Embedded Hypervisor, which is currently in Beta, is based on KVM. Also KVM is provided today in Fedora.

Red Hat's virtualization architecture aims to remove complexity for customers, and ultimately the implementation of virtualization technology used should not matter to our customers. Of most importance is performance, manageability, and compatibility.

Red Hat will be able to offer a secure and scalable virtualization platform to Windows desktop customers. Red Hat is focused on providing the best infrastructure upon which to run the complete spectrum of enterprise workloads. This will range from server virtualization to desktop virtualization, which includes Linux servers, Windows servers, Linux desktops, and Windows desktops — all running on and managed by a Red Hat infrastructure.