The oVirt project today announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With the oVirt project, the industry gains an open source, openly governed virtualization stack.

The oVirt project was formed to deliver and establish a development community around an integrated virtualization platform that offers advanced virtualization management capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler and more. With this project, Red Hat has open sourced its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management technology. The project combines the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management technology code with established open technologies, including KVM, the oVirt node for running virtual machines and virtualization tools such as libvirt and v2v. oVirt aims to deliver both a cohesive stack and discretely reusable components for open virtualization management, and to improve key building blocks for private and public cloud deployments.

The oVirt project comes on the heels of the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance in May 2011 to foster the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative. The Open Virtualization Alliance has achieved significant global interest and momentum with membership numbers growing over 20-fold in its first several months of practice.

To drive the establishment of an active community around oVirt, the project board leaders held an open community project launch and workshop November 1-3, 2011, in San Jose, Calif. on the Cisco campus to officially kick off the project and community. Sessions at the workshop covered technical sub-projects, governance, how to get involved, usage and more. Full source code for the open management system was also launched during the event.

Mark Baker, server product manager at Canonical comments, “It is important for us to be involved in the oVirt project, which enables users to more easily deploy virtualized solutions using open source software. Having a robust management stack around KVM is key to enabling organizations to use open source virtualization solutions in their datacenters. Increasing the number of enterprise-class virtualization solutions available can only be a good thing for the industry.”

“We are excited to be a part of the oVirt project,” said Jean Staten Healy, director of Linux at IBM. “Our clients are looking for open alternatives to traditional virtualization technology, both for the hypervisor and virtualization management. This project and the work of the Open Virtualization Alliance are important steps forward in making open virtualization a reality for businesses around the world.”

“NetApp views the ecosystem of solutions around KVM to be important to our customers and to the industry,” said Jon Benedict, reference architect, VMware Engineering at NetApp. “Our participation as a strategic member of oVirt.org demonstrates our commitment to open source, industry cooperation and leadership in storage for virtualized environments.”

“The establishment of the oVirt project as an open source community around virtualization management technology and open virtualization management for KVM as a whole will help drive innovation and the evolution of open virtualization alternatives,” said Carl Trieloff, technical director at Red Hat. “This is another proof point in Red Hat’s commitment to the open source community and open development model. The kickoff workshop in November was oversubscribed, showing the interest in open virtualization alternatives.”

“We are very excited to see open source virtualization extend into the management of enterprise workloads thanks to the oVirt initiative. SUSE has been embracing open source virtualization for a long time now, as the first company to deliver open source virtualization in an enterprise product and as a steady long-term contributor to the KVM hypervisor technology. oVirt has the building blocks that will help bring KVM virtualization management to a broader customer base,” said Alexander Graf, virtualization lead engineer and oVirt board member at SUSE.

For more information about the oVirt project or to get involved, visit www.ovirt.org.