Hot on the heels of the Intel/McAfee deal and the Dell/HP/3PAR bidding war comes more possible acquisition news: Rumor has it that SAP will acquire Red Hat.

Local Tech Wire, an IT blog based in Red Hat’s home state of North Carolina, reported on the SAP/Red Hat rumor this morning. Several Wall Street analysts came across the rumor yesterday, and Red Hat’s vaguely worded “product roadmap” announcement — scheduled for tomorrow — only bolstered the speculation more.

Virtualization clearly wouldn’t be the driving force behind an SAP/Red Hat acquisition. From a tech standpoint, Linux is a favorite among SAP shops, so there would be some natural synergies there, as they say. Or, like the Intel/McAfee deal, it could just make good financial sense.

But an SAP/Red Hat acquisition would definitely affect the virtualization market, even though SAP and Red Hat aren’t exactly leaders. Let’s take a look at where they stand:

• Red Hat has placed all its virtualization chips on KVM. It was one of the most-talked-about subjects at this year’s Red Hat Summit, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will support only KVM, not Xen. But the company is still playing catch-up in virtualization, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to migrate from Xen to KVM.
• SAP, meanwhile, has relied on partners to help customers virtualize applications, but it’s been slow going so far — mostly test and dev, not production environments. One thing SAP does have going for it is its partnership with VMware. To spur more SAP virtualization deployments, the company is bundling its software on VBlock Infrastructure Packages from VMware, EMC and Cisco Systems. And although SAP has never named preferred partners in virtualization before, there are indications that could be changing — with VMware at the top of the list.

So where would that leave KVM? It’s unlikely that SAP would break off its relationship with the virtualization market leader to go with a relatively new, unproven technology. SAP probably wouldn’t kill off KVM, but it doesn’t send a good message when even your parent company doesn’t use your own virtualization technology. Whatever KVM momentum Red Hat has built up over the past year or so would pretty much disappear.

Of course, the SAP/Red Hat acquisition is all speculation at this point. But these days, every vendor has some stakes in the virtualization ground, and it’s interesting to examine how every move — or potential move — could affect the market.

SearchSAP.com News Editor Courtney Bjorlin contributed to this report.

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In case you missed it, News Director Alex Barrett has a very interesting story up on our sister site SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. It’s about the Linux community and what she calls its “mass exodus” from Xen to KVM virtualization.

The Xen vs. KVM debate is not new, but it has definitely been picking up steam as of late. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has given Xen the “let’s just be friends” speech and moved in with KVM. Several major hosting providers are switching their platforms from Xen to KVM. And many Linux diehards say Xen is a huge pain to manage.

The battle lines are drawn, and the fate of the open source virtualization market hangs in the balance. (How’s that for overdramatic? I think I’ve been watching too many “Lost” commercials.)

Anyway, the ramifications of this potential shift may also affect the open source OS market. Leading the charge on this side of the battle is Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, the co-founder of XenSource. Red Hat is trying to move customers off Xen, and now he’s trying to move customers off Red Hat.

“If you approach your virtualized world with a Linux/RHEL based mindset, then I recommend you consider switching to Oracle Enterprise Linux,” he blogged last week. “It is a superior, enterprise class version of RHEL. … Alternatively, if you’re wary of giving Larry more control than he already has over your environment, Novell SUSE Linux offers a superb enterprise Linux platform.” (Note that Crosby linked Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s name to a picture of his massive yacht.)

I’ve previously said that Red Hat has nothing to lose by switching from Xen to KVM. I meant that in terms of Red Hat’s standing in the virtualization market. VMware, Microsoft and Citrix are way ahead of Red Hat there. (And as Crosby blogged, “Having failed to capitalize on Xen, Red Hat needs a ‘differentiated’ story in virtualization in order to regain credibility.)

But Red Hat has a ton to lose in the enterprise Linux server OS market, where it’s the leader. Sure, the Linux community may be in love with KVM, but Red Hat butters its bread thanks to the IT admins and systems engineers who work with RHEL. The company can’t afford to turn off these core customers in its pursuit of the virtualization market.

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Novell is jumping on the KVM bandwagon.

The company is developing a KVM hypervisor called AlacrityVM, as virtualization.info points out. The move follows in the footsteps of Red Hat, Novell’s open source rival, which moved from Xen to KVM with its latest release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

KVM is still a relatively unproven enterprise technology with a very small user base. Its biggest advantage over Xen, the leader in Linux virtualization, is that it is built into the Linux kernel. And that’s just not enough of a reason to switch for most people.

The proprietary virtualization platforms, VMware and Hyper-V, are far and away the market leaders. Behind them are the Xen platforms, led by Citrix XenServer but also including Oracle VM and others.

Red Hat and Novell are even further behind. They really have nothing to lose, so they both can afford to take a shot on KVM. If the technology catches on, they can ride the wave and prosper. If not, they won’t be much worse off.

For more on Linux virtualization trends, check out this Xen vs. KVM face-off between experts Andi Mann and Sander van Vugt.

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Xen.org posted the Xen 4.0 Release Candidate this week, and the new hypervisor code should be finalized by the end of next month.

Xen 4.0 will feature fault tolerance and the Open Virtual Switch, among other new features. Open source virtualization expert Sander van Vugt said the Open Virtual Switch “will take networking in Xen to the next level.”

“I’m convinced that this release is going to be huge,” he wrote in an email.

The new release comes at a crucial point for Xen. Citrix, the company most closely associated with Xen, faces constant questions about its commitment to XenServer and the server virtualization market as a whole.

Meanwhile, as virtualization.info’s Alessandro Perilli points out, Oracle is looking to become a bigger player in virtualization. Its Oracle VM is also Xen-based, so Xen 4.0 could help its charge into the market. (But then again, so could the rumored Oracle-Citrix acquisition.)

Xen also has an emerging open source challenger on its in hands in KVM, which is built into the Linux kernel. Although van Vugt took the side of KVM in our recent Xen vs. KVM debate, he still predicts good things for the future of Xen.

“Currently, VMware clearly is the more complete virtualization solution,” he wrote in his email. “Releasing the Xen 4 hypervisor will put Xen completely back in the picture, not only for Citrix, but for all other players in the Xen area as well.”

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The new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform made its debut yesterday, with Red Hat touting it as a “standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor” that “provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments” and comes with software “for configuring, provisioning, managing and organizing virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.”

Sounds good so far, right? Well, there are a few things Red Hat neglected to mention in that press release. First, there’s this sentence buried in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization data sheet, about the system requirements for management servers:

“Windows Server 2008 not supported.”

Isn’t that kinda like coming out with a hot new car and saying, “unleaded gasoline not supported”?

In our recent “Virtualization Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey,” 51% of respondents said they have Windows Server 2008 installed, and 36% said they use Windows Server 2008 for mission-critical applications. It was the second most popular server OS, behind Windows Server 2003.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the third most popular server OS among our survey respondents, with a 36% installed base and 29% use for mission-critical applications. And here’s the kicker: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers won’t support that OS either!

The data sheet doesn’t explicitly say there’s no RHEL support, like it does for Windows Server 2008, but the management server requirements specifically say that you need an x86 server with the U.S. English language version of Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2, .NET 3.5 or later with the Application Server role installed.

Red Hat is trying to become a bigger player in the virtualization market. The company has taken a different approach, embracing the KVM hypervisor over Xen. And this new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform is its most ambitious attempt yet.

But by not supporting management servers that run Windows Server 2008 or RHEL (or any other OS besides Windows Server 2003), Red Hat cuts out a huge chunk of potential customers and makes its uphill climb in the market even steeper.

Hat tip to @nickyp, who pointed out the Windows Server 2003 requirement on Twitter.

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