VMware joins Linux Foundation

Virtualization giant VMware has joined the Linux Foundation, lining up alongside existing members like Adobe, Google and IBM. Virtualization is a hot topic these days.
“A growing number of organizations run their Linux environments on VMware virtualization, and the Linux Foundation gives us a collaborative forum to effectively address the needs of our customers,” the company said in a brief statement.
The company stressed its support for major Linux distros, its contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) for paravirtualization and the release of an implementation of its VMware tools to open source as the Open Virtual Machine Tools.

VMware has become a member of the Linux Foundation to serve a growing number of organisations that run their Linux environments on VMware virtualisation. VMware claims to support all major Linux operating systems and says it will work with the Linux Foundation and its members to address the increasing number of Linux users who are working with high performance computing (HPC), managed desktops.

VMware said the decision was driven in part by its customers, who have been asking for more Linux implementations. VMware’s participation in the Linux community includes the contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a paravirtualisation interface as an open specification, and subsequent collaboration with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of a source-level paravirtualisation interface (paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel. VMware is obviously a leader in that field and a leading ISV who has embraced theLinux platform,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The LinuxFoundation.

Virtualization has clearly become an industry darling, and VMware controls 55 per cent of that market. Virtualization management will need to address heterogeneous environments that combine any number of different software. Virtualization, the ability to run software in virtualized containers so multiple OSes or versions can run on one physical machine, is becoming more prevalent in IT environments.