Despite the acquisition of Qumranet happened in September 2008, Red Hat remained silent for long time. But a few months after the launch of its new, KVM-based virtualization platform (just updated to version 2.2) the company started to push pretty hard the marketing message, and VMware is its main target.
The company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst is becoming increasingly aggressive: in March he said that VMware customers look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) as a parallel hypervisor to have. Now he’s promising that RHEV will leapfrog the the vSphere platform just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leapfrogged Sun Solaris for SPARC.
The change in tune may depend on the massive criticism that VMware expressed on the RHEV platform.
Apparently, the Red Hat goal for 2010 is to have at least 500 customers in North America.
But more interesting than that is the claim that RHEV already beats the VMware infrastructure on scalability and performance, suggesting that ESX is an old technology that doesn’t adapt well to cloud computing architectures.