The WNY Technology Blog

Some of you may have read or heard about the unconfirmed rumor that VMware is interested in purchasing Red Hat. I thought I would comment a little about this as well as my overall thoughts.

I have gotten sort of used to all of the rumors involving Red Hat over the years and who is buying them out today or who they may be buying, so until I actually see official confirmation from Red Hat itself, I normally just brush them all to the side, however this one sort of grabbed my attention and kept it. This isn’t because I am a huge fan of VMware, don’t get me wrong, yes it is a great product and I have and still do use VMware solutions where it makes sense. I think what may have grabbed me is why and who would really benefit if this rumor came to fruition.

First off VMware has plenty of money sitting in their account to acquire Red Hat flat out, VMware also has a history with the Red Hat product considering their ESX underlying platform was based off a Red Hat derivative. But why does VMware need an OS when they just spent quite a bit of time getting rid of it in their latest virtualization offerings?

Red Hat, who just recently announced they were embracing KVM as their future virtualization technology, do they really need to add another virtualization player to the mix, in the name of VMware?

Let’s analyze this for a bit, first off each of these companies are currently sitting on top of their markets, Red Hat at the Enterprise Linux market, and VMware at the overall Virtualization market. This in and of itself makes them both key targets for their competition and it is no secret that XEN (now owned by Citrix) is hot on the heels of VMware in hopes of dethroning them, but would this deal make sense for either company?

I am sort of torn here but ultimately I would say a very hesitant yes, let me explain why.

Red Hat who has embraced KVM as their future Virtualization technology could really use an already established Virtualization technology like VMware to bolster their products, KVM as of right now works on most platforms but I would not feel comfortable deploying it in prime time today. With that said, Red Hat has the resources and the Development skills to make KVM a big player in a very short time, which not only helps consumers due to additional competition in the market, but also the Open Source Community as these changes would also be available to everyone else.

VMware on the other hand, would need to have something up their sleeves for this to make sense and my guess and opinion is that they are interested in getting their hypervisor technology directly into the Linux Kernel. The fastest and easiest way for this to occur would be by buying Red Hat, since there are numerous Kernel Developers who just happen to be employed currently by Red Hat, that could easily get this done in a very short time frame. VMware would definitely need to make some changes in order for this to occur but honestly I just cant see any other thing that would make this worthwhile for VMware.

Do I think this would work? Perhaps, but I really don’t like it at all personally.

Do I think it will happen? Not sure but my gut says no. I had the pleasure of personally meeting and talking with Jim Whitehurst the CEO of Red Hat while I was at the Red Hat Summit back in June and from that discussion as well as his keynote speech at the Red Hat Summit, he has a vision for Red Hat and he doesn’t seem like the type that would just abandon that vision by selling out.

But hey this is America and money talks, so who knows…

I am interested in what others may think about this unconfirmed rumor and look forward to your comments.

Filed under: Linux | Tagged: Red Hat Linux, Virtualization, VMware