Advancements in Open Virtualization with KVM

KVM is the only hypervisor that leverages both the scalability of Linux and the performance of hardware virtualization. As a result KVM is gaining adoption for some unique workloads. In addition, KVM is pressuring proprietary hypervisor vendors to be more open and competitive in their market practices.

IBM has been actively developing and using KVM internally and in products since 2007 for several key reasons. Over the past two years we have seen customers and organizations expand their use of KVM into some interesting and forward-looking use cases.

Todays challenge for the KVM development community is to make the hypervisor easier to use, more self-aware (in the sense that it can tune itself), and to enable an ISV ecosystem around the oVirt and OpenStack infrastructures. Until this happens KVM will be used largely by infrastructure providers and sophisticated organizations.