While VMware is clearly the dominant virtual machine in use inside the enterprise today, there are those who are betting that open source virtual machines will gain ground as IT organizations move to embrace converged infrastructure.
Scale Computing today announced a new version of HC3 HyperCore converged infrastructure platform that adds support for replication between the instances of the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) software on which the platform is built.
Scale Computing CTO Jason Collier says that instead of relying on expensive, proprietary, virtual machine software as the foundation for deploying converged infrastructure, HC3 HyperCore 6.0 provides all the benefits of a modern IT environment without nearly as much cost.
Version 6.0 of HC3 HyperCore also adds a streamlined user interface that Collier says makes it simpler to manage the converged infrastructure environment. Obviously, the rise of converged infrastructure will have major ramifications on traditionally managed IT. The degree to which server and storage management will converge, of course, remains to be seen. But Collier says that IT organizations shouldn’t have to deploy and then learn new complex management frameworks to achieve that goal.
In the meantime, KVM is widely used by cloud service providers, but adoption of KVM inside the enterprise has been fairly limited. With the rise of the open source OpenStack cloud management frameworks, however, many IT organizations are now reviewing their options as far as proprietary virtualization software is concerned.