Lyman adds, "Red Hat felt it had to make this acquisition to be a bigger player in virtualization, to continue extending and building from its OS and before somebody else did. By acquiring Qumranet, Red Hat adds the people and products it needs to do that integration and polish work on KVM, but it will take some time to integrate into RHEL."

Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst for the Kusnetzky Group looks at Red Hat's history. "Virtualization has appeared to be a secondary concern for Red Hat for quite some time.

Although the company included both Xen and KVM in their product since both are standard parts of the Linux kernel at this point, the focus of their efforts seemed on other levels of the software stack.

As virtualized environments become increasingly important, the company needed to do something to 1) improve Red Hat's position in the market, 2) acquire useful, workable technology and 3) acquire talent in their area of virtual machine software and 4) move into an area that offered a rich source of other talent."

"The acquisition of Qumranet appears to have touched on all of those points," Kuznetzky concludes. "Red Hat's move was covered broadly and demonstrated their interest in virtualization. Qumranet's SolidICE and management technology offers Red Hat a toe hold in the desktop virtualization market and offers room to reach into the server virtualization arena. Qumranet's staff includes many of the key developers of KVM, developers who also have deep levels of expertise in other virtualization technology as well. Red Hat now has access to a wealth of [virtualization] expertise."

So, from the experts' viewpoint it certainly appears that Red Hat is making the right moves to become a player in the virtualization market. Now, the question is: "Will the market agree?"

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.