Open Virtualization Alliance

The announcement of the new organization took place in May, 2011 at the Open Source Business Conference conference which took place in the city of Santa Clara in California. It is obvious that Open Virtualization Alliance is first of all friendship against VMware which control the most part of the market of virtualization now. "All want an open alternative of VMware. Infrastructure of future cloud computing should be based on the open code", – Scott Crenshaw, the vice president and the chief manager of division of Red Hat on cloud computing says.

As Inna Kuznetsova reported CNews, the vice president of IBM for marketing and sales, the system software and ISV, creation of Open Virtualization Alliance does not mean failure of IBM from support of other similar technologies: "We will continue to support a broad spectrum of technologies of virtualization, including Xen, VMware and Hyper-V, – she says. – But at the same time, we stratsya to expand possibilities of the choice at the expense of an output one market more better than products and creation of a wide ecosystem around these products".

Before the alliance was publicly announced, the idea about its creation was studied within three months. So far it is hard to say, how seriously new initiative will be able to shake positions of VMware. At least, not all from participants of alliance test confidence that KVM is ready to compete to VMware on equal terms already now. So, the representative of Intel speaking at a conference told that KVM now "lacks glaze", i.e., additional tools, solutions and marketing support.

"VMware follows the same strategy, as Microsoft, trying to create a big ecosystem, to draw on itself all advanced developments and to force out less large players out of business limits. We offer the open environment and equal opportunities... besides, it is emerging market, and nobody would like to observe that everything in this market will belong to one company".

It should be noted that KVM is not the only system of virtualization with the open code which competes with VMware. There is a Xen project which is supported by Citrix company and also the solution OpenVZ of Parallels allowing to achieve higher performance in comparison with analogs at the expense of partial — but not complete — virtualizations.

"As ourselves depend on technologies of virtualization based on a hypervisor, we cannot but welcome creation of alliance, – James Bottomley, CTO Parallels on server virtualization reported CNews. – But at the same time, we should emphasize that KVM is not the only technology which competes with VMware in this market and that ourselves actively develop technology of container virtualization which it is extremely relevant in the conditions of cloud computing".

The Sourcefire company, the founder of Open-Source of the Snort system, joined at the beginning of 2012 consortium Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) and announced that solutions of Sourcefire IPS got support of the virtual Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform. The solutions Sourcefire Virtual 3D Sensor Sourcefire also Virtual Defense Center have support of three most popular virtual environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Xen and VMware. The solutions Sourcefire Virtual Sensor have all functionality of solutions of Sourcefire IPS and IPS devices of new generation. Clients can use Virtual Defense Center for control both over virtual, and over the physical solutions 3D Sensor.

Among tasks of new alliance — increase in awareness of users in the field of best practices and providing recommendations about more weighed assessment of different options of deployment of the systems of virtualization to them.