OVA boosts member numbers

Information Week.

Proprietary virtualisation from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems became more deeply entrenched than ever over these last six months.

According to The Register, OVA said many of the new members come from emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, and over half of its members are focused on cloud computing in their day-to-day business. Recent sign-ups include NEC, Hitachi, Platform Computing and Tripwire.

"The tremendous growth in OVA membership is a very encouraging sign of the interest and potential for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in emerging markets, and in the cloud, where open virtualisation is poised to be a key technology,” says Gary Chen, research manager of enterprise virtualisation software at IDC.

KVM is built into Linux, and enables the Linux kernel itself to act as a hypervisor, notes The Journal. In the past, KVM was not considered an enterprise-grade virtualisation solution.

OVA stated that KVM is a full virtualisation solution for Linux on x86 hardware that contains virtualisation extensions for Intel VT and AMD-V, and that KVM can run multiple virtual machines with unmodified Linux or Windows images.

Open virtualisation is just another step on the evolutionary computing scale, as users become more interested in cloud-ready implementations.