Open Source | News

Open Virtualization Alliance Now Tops 200 Members

• By Leila Meyer
• 09/21/11

The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), an organization of technology companies created to promote support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization platform, reported it's experiencing rapid growth in participation from cloud computing companies and emerging markets around the world.

The OVA was launched in May 2011. Founding members included BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SUSE. Sixty-five more companies joined in June, and more than 200 technology companies now belong to the organization.

The goal of the OVA is to encourage adoption of KVM as an open virtualization technology alternative to proprietary solutions such as the industry-leading VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Many of the OVA member companies previously supported the open source Xen hypervisor but are now throwing their weight behind KVM instead.

KVM is built in to Linux and enables the Linux kernel itself to act as a hypervisor. In the past, KVM was not considered an enterprise-grade virtualization solution, but according to the OVA, recent technology advances in KVM have changed that. The organization claimed that KVM now offers the performance, scalability, and security necessary for an enterprise-class hypervisor.

The OVA stated that KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware that contains virtualization extensions for Intel VT and AMD-V and that KVM can run multiple virtual machines with unmodified Linux or Windows images. The OVA also pointed out that KVM benefits from the experience and support of a community of thousands of developers and that because it is embedded in the Linux kernel, it inherits the performance, scalability, and security of the Linux operating system.

A full list of KVM features is available on the KVM project site.