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Open Virtualization Alliance - OVA

Comprised of leading virtualization, datacenter, and cloud solution providers, the Open Virtualization Alliance's goal is to help:

• Increase overall awareness and understanding of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
• Foster the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative to proprietary solutions.
• Accelerate the emergence of an ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM.
• Encourage interoperability, promote best practices, and highlight examples of customer successes.

What the Open Virtualization Alliance will do

To accomplish our goals, the Open Virtualization Alliance will work to:

• Enable KVM-based solutions and facilitates bringing them to market.
• Increase the adoption and number of KVM-based solutions.
• Increase confidence in KVM-based solutions through marketing and promotional activities. This is intended to complement the processes and structures already in place in the open source community while recognizing that software, technology roadmaps, specifications, and development will continue to take place within those community processes.
• Publish best practices on design guidance for KVM-based solutions in the form of design patterns, blueprints, reference architectures, and more.
• Host industry and other marketing events.
• Educate the marketplace about KVM and KVM-based solutions.
• Solicit the participation of all interested parties on a fair, equitable, and open basis.

Current governing members are:

• HP
• IBM
• Intel
• RedHat

Why KVM?

Simple. KVM is an impressive enterprise-grade alternative to expensive proprietary virtualization solutions. Many leading independent software vendors (ISVs) are committed to KVM and KVM-based solutions for its:

• Record-breaking performance: Added virtualization-specific performance-enhancing features–like SR-IOV, hugepages, and asynchronous I/O–let Red Hat® Enterprise Virtualization and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) achieve record-breaking virtualization performance.
• Superior scalability: KVM can scale up to 4,096 core hosts with 64TB of RAM and 64 vCPU guests with 2TB of RAM - well above what competing proprietary solutions can offer.
• Advanced security: SELinux allows fine-grained kernel-level security policies to be applied to virtual machines (VMs). No other hypervisor on the market supports this advanced security infrastructure.
• High quality of service (QoS): Linux® includes C-Groups (control groups), which allow fine-grained QoS policies for Linux processes. Because KVM is part of the Linux kernel, a VM is no different than any other program running on Linux. So administrators can set defined thresholds for CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O, guaranteeing the QoS for given VMs.
• Lower cost: Companies that have deployed KVM-based solutions saved up to 80% over deploying similar configurations based on proprietary solutions.
• Open ecosystem: KVM's open source architecture gives you more choice–unlike proprietary solutions that may limit the type of partners and, thus, the choice of interoperable solutions available. IBM Open Virtualization Pages
• Educational Resources: IBM has created extensive KVM documentation covering best practices, performance tuning, security, frequently asked questions and more. Learn more about IBM KVM documentation.

Source:  Open Virtualization Alliance