Red Hat is definitively preparing for the imminent launch of its new enterprise virtualization offering based on KVM and the Qumranet technologies acquired in September 2008.
A very important piece of the puzzle is how Windows guest operating systems will perform on the Red Hat implementation of KVM.
Most virtual machines on the planet runs Windows, so if Red Hat doesn’t shine here it will have nothing concrete to compete against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.
In mid-July the company gave a hint on how it plans to manage this aspect of its strategy: it released version 1.0 of its KVM para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes under the open source GPLv2 license.
The set includes the network driver (kvmnet) and the device block driver (viostor) and both already are certified against the Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL).
Thanks to Linux-KVM.com for the news.