IT Leaders Forum: Open-source hypervisors challenge main players

Panellists at Computing's latest IT Leaders Forum agreed there was a strong case for open-source hypervisors in the virtualisation market.

They argued that the strong challenge to dominant competitors such as VMWare is necessary to keep the industry innovative.

"Open source is of interest to everyone in the IT industry," said Karl Deacon, global CTO, infrastructure services at Capgemini.

He added that cloud companies on the US west coast will always ask why anyone would launch cloud services with industry-standard hypervisors, pointing out that they use billions of cheap open source ones instead.

"Open-source hypervisors are written by people who know how this stuff works. They aren't designed with a fixed operating system in mind, but with a focus on services and how you can best deliver them from a disaggregated computer base," he said.

A hypervisor traditionally works as a manager of multiple operating systems, sitting in the layer below the OS itself. It is from this position that the OS and the hypervisor jointly controls the hardware drivers lower down in the stack.

Deacon argued that the open source community is designing hypervisors that are not constrained by the operating system.

"These hypervisors are actually being designed to do the job that we all want to use them for: to offer services from component parts. What you get from the old IT industry is that they are trying to forward-engineer what they have done for the last 15 years with the operating system," he added.

Mark Leonard, VP infrastructure services unit at Colt Technology Services Group, argued that the IT industry will start to use more open-source hypervisors, but also said that they aren't as capable as proprietary alternatives.

"You will definitely see more uptake of open-source hypervisors, especially as we begin to see things like the KVM alliance begin to form," said Leonard.

HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat joined forces last month to create the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA), aiming to drive adoption of an open-source virtualisation product called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

"However, there will be an ongoing advances in functionality, and as quickly as the main players can keep moving, the open source community will chase them. There will always be a differences, though," said Leonard.

Deacon also highlighted the benefits of open competition within the virtualisation market.

"If nothing else, the open source players keep the rest of the industry honest. The best thing that ever happened to Microsoft was Google. In the last five years, it has been more competitive, more innovative and more customer-orientated than it was prior to that," he said.

"This is what we are seeing with the KVMs of the world. So we can only be grateful for open competition. The more, the better."