Red Hat takes on VMware with Enterprise Virtualisation 3.0

Red Hat has made a bid to compete with VMware in the server virtualisation space with the global releases of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV) 3.0 platform.

The company said that its open source virtualisation platform would offer greater flexibility and more server headroom than VMware.

The latest version of RHEV will sport improved performance with the KVM hypervisor platform along with increased hardware support and headroom.

"We have been shipping Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation for more than two years and since then we have spoken to hundreds of customers," Red Hat senior director of virtualisation business Navin Thadani, told reporters.

"One thing that is exceedingly clear is that there is a strong demand for an alternative to VMware."

Thadani explained that many firms have had a desire for an alternative platform, particularly one with more flexibility than VMware.

The enterprise virtualisation and cloud computing spaces have expanded in recent months. Along with virtualisation pioneers such as VMware, enterprise computing names such as Oracle have sought to enter the server virtualisation space.

Among the biggest advantages cited by Red Hat was the hardware capacity and cloud capabilities of RHEV 3.0. The platform will offer support for two, four and eight-socket systems, as well as support for more than 1,000 virtual machines and tested memory capacities as high as 8TB.

Red Hat also championed its open source roots. The company said that, while competing platforms have only partially committed to open source, RHEV was fully committed to being an open platform.

"Unlike VMware and other solutions that are based on a proprietary kernel, we leverage the development that has gone on by the much larger linux community," Thadani said.

"We believe this is the ideal foundation for the Linux constituency,"