We took notice of the availability of RHEV 3 and say “Good and welcome to our world!” We’re happy to have the company – and good company at that, fighting the good fight against the dominant player in the industry.

We’ve said before that Linux virtualization technologies – KVM and Xen – represent compelling alternatives to VMware’s proprietary and locked hypervisor.

As we recently announced, Convirture built strong momentum in 2011 increasing our customer base ten-fold for the commercial product, ConVirt Enterprise. We now have customers for our commercial product offerings in every global region, including North and South America, EMEA and Asia. And, our open source version of ConVirt has now been downloaded more than 60,000 times. In total, ConVirt software, which is available for most major Linux distributions including Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, is now being used by more than 8,000 businesses.

We see the compass pointing unmistakably toward open source and away from VMware’s expensive technology. And, evidently, we’re not alone with Red Hat in the fray with us.

It appears that VMware is not only pricing itself out of new customers, but also current customers. An October 11, 2011, by Beth Pariseau story on SearchServerVirtualization shows that open source virtualization is encroaching on VMware. An InformationWeek story by Charles Babcock on November 3, 2011, also shows that VMware pricing is a real concern.

We always knew that KVM and Xen represented a compelling alternative to VMware’s proprietary and locked hypervisor. We have many users and customers who are taking advantage of open source’s ability to provide a free platform on which to build out a virtual datacenter before committing to it. As a result, KVM and Xen make it into production from the outside margins of many companies and work their way in.

What these stories also tell us is that VMware’s pricing is so scary for businesses that change is also coming from the inside of enterprises. IT managers are now considering ripping and replacing VMware with open source. Clearly, the cost/benefit/performance analysis that people are doing demonstrate an ROI that justifies abandoning VMware’s ongoing license fees and adapting KVM and Xen.

As the ecosystem, management tools and support for the KVM and Xen hypervisors continue to grow and improve, performance differentiations with VMware will become increasingly irrelevant and IT managers will be able to judge based simply on what is delivering the best VALUE to their organization.

The compass is pointing unmistakably toward open source.