Two weeks ago the Red Hat CEO hinted at his upcoming virtualization strategy but was careful enough to not say when KVM would be integrated into the company enterprise distribution.
Now CBR reports that Red Hat may be ready by the first half of 2009.
By that time the company will completely replace Xen with KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but will continue to offer support for the former virtualization plaform for another seven years.
The company Vice President for EMEA, Werner Knoblich, insisted that KVM is better than Xen (or VMware ESX) when talking about large-scale deployments (thousands of virtual machines) because the virtualization engine fully leverages the Linux kernel capabilities while the bare-metal hypervisors cannot.
True or not, such comment highlights how Red Hat is looking at KVM for cloud computing much more than for server consolidation.