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A seven-member consortium today formed the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to foster the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The seven founding members are BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE.

The Open Virtualization Alliance will promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability, and speed up the expansion of the ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM.

OVA will also provide education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their virtualization options. 

The consortium complements the existing open source communities managing the development of the KVM hypervisor and associated management capabilities, which are rapidly driving technology innovations for customers virtualizing both Linux and Windows applications. 

KVM is a virtual machine implementation using the operating system's kernel, which is the central component of most computer operating systems.

By enhancing application performance, KVM virtualization is said to simplify the process of transitioning from single system deployments to large-scale cloud computing. 

As a core component in the Linux kernel, KVM leverages hardware virtualization support built into Intel and AMD processors, providing an environment for hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines.