The Open Vitualization Alliance was announced last week, promoted by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Novell, BMC, and Eucalyptus Systems. The Alliance was formed to promote an open source virtualization stack built on the KVM hypervisor. KVM is currently part of the mainstream Linux kernel project. It is built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, supplanting Xen, the open-source hypervisor stewarded by Citrix. The alliance was perceived as a shot across the bow of VMWare, which is the market leader in virtualization.
