Comments on: Making sense of a VMware acquisition of Red Hat

VMware is rumored to be interested in buying Red Hat, but it doesn't make sense.

[kit_plummer]

Even as a purely "marketing"-oriented move I think VMware has something here. Both companies appear to be bearing the burden of saturation. Technically, I agree I'm not sure the "stack" fits. But, hey both Sun and Microsoft have plays in this game. So, maybe VMware should have an OS under the umbrella...or more appropriately RedHat should have a VM under its.

[kit_plummer]

Even as a purely "marketing"-oriented move I think VMware has something here. Both companies appear to be bearing the burden of saturation. Technically, I agree I'm not sure the "stack" fits. But, hey both Sun and Microsoft have plays in this game. So, maybe VMware should have an OS under the umbrella...or more appropriately RedHat should have a VM under its.

[jrepenning]

Tricky bit is: the apps that make the very most sense to virtualize are the old, leftover, legacy ones running on P3/sub-GHz doorstoppers, whose code was long lost to history. Hard to acquire.

[rcardona2k]

Technically, Red Hat is not much a fit for VMware. VMware spent serious R&D to eliminate the Service Console from ESX, which is based on a Red Hat derivative. And VMware also touts JeOS, Just enough Operating System, which is NOT what RH Enterprise Linux is.

On the other hand, VMware could take commanding interest in shaping Red Hat's future in virtualization around ESX compatibility and Xen and KVM. This would provide the market potentially with a "second source" provider of a hypervisor and an OS designed run on both ESX with openvmtools and VMI . Second source virtualization could come from Xen or KVM investments. VMware has been on the sidelines with virtualization in the Linux kernel, aquiring Red Hat would increase their level of participation.

[The_Decider]

I think it is a pretty good match and could be a response to what Novell did with Xen in OpenSuSE 11.0. Installing xen, and configuring VM's is now a few clicks and a reboot (although the kernel used for this doesn't play nice with nvidia's video driver, which isn't a big deal if you want to virtualize servers on top of an OS, but it is annoying to me in my office grr....) and you are up an running.

"Are there particular applications that lend themselves well to virtualization?"

Yes, and RedHat is often the vendor of choice for these applications to run on.