Red Hat is moving into virtual desktops with the acquisition of Qumranet, a firm specialising in virtual infrastructure.

The move will enable Red Hat customers to centralise the provision of Windows and Linux clients as server-hosted virtual machines for greater security and reduced management overheads, according to the firm.

Already one of the leading providers of Linux server software, Red Hat now seems to be aiming at becoming a broader source of enterprise infrastructure.

"This acquisition means that Red Hat is positioned to be one of only two firms in the world with a comprehensive virtual solutions portfolio," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president for products and technology.

The other firm, according to Cormier, is Microsoft. He claimed that the breadth of integration between the operating system, hypervisor, guest operating systems and applications is something that other virtualisation providers such as VMware cannot match.

"Lack of this breadth is their Achilles heel," he said.

Following the purchase, Red Hat has gained Qumranet's staff and its technology, consisting of its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and Solid ICE virtual desktop infrastructure.

With these products, Red Hat customers will be able to consolidate desktop systems into a server farm using KVM as the virtualisation platform and Solid ICE providing the management tools.

Remote access is via Qumranet's own remote protocol, called Spice.

"This now enables Red Hat to provide the virtual enterprise with complete solutions from the server to the desktop," said Cormier.

The move puts Red Hat up against Microsoft, VMware and Citrix as a provider of enterprise-class virtualisation tools, but it also calls into question the company's commitment to the Xen open-source hypervisor project.

Red Hat has been a significant contributor to Xen, which underpins the virtualisation capabilities in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at Red Hat, said that the firm will "keep driving Xen forwards", but he also praised KVM as a "next-generation hypervisor".

KVM is Linux-based but operates as a bare-metal hypervisor, according to Stevens.

It can also support full virtualisation, where guest operating systems need no modification to run in a virtual environment, and para-virtualisation, where a special driver stack is used to boost performance of the guests by optimising I/O operations.