Enterprise Virtualization: Red Hat vs. VMware and Microsoft

Sure, you know about the big virtualization solutions like VMware’s and Microsoft’s. But Red Hat? Paul Rubens looks at the open source player.

Why would anyone use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) instead of VMware’s or Microsoft’s virtualization technologies?

Talk to Navin Thadani, Red Hat’s senior director, virtualization, and he’ll tell you that RHEV’s attractions are that it offers high-performance server virtualization, it’s scalable, and it’s very secure. And, perhaps most importantly, it offers “solid economics for customers.” What does that mean? It’s less expensive than Hyper-V and VMware, in other words.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) doesn’t seem to sell RHEV based on the features it offers, and that’s probably because it lacks a few key ones. Despite Thadani promising as long ago as February 2010 that “you will be able to do an apples-for-apples feature comparison between us and VMware,” RHEV is still quite a few pieces of fruit short of a full picnic basket vis a vis VMware.

Read the rest about Red Hat’s virtualization offering at ServerWatch.