In the middle of the great discussions and conferences taking place at JBoss World, Orlando, Red Hat quietly leaked out the first cut of what is likely to influence the future of virtualization. Project oVirt. oVirt’s aim is to transform the host virtualization layer into a small stateless image which can be embedded on FLASH, or booted off a CD or PXE. No local disks needed. No installs. A physical server can become a virtual server just by booting oVirt.
oVirt also includes a new web management console which can manage any libvirt-based virtualization system. Whether that be one personal system, or the enterprise. It is no accident that oVirt is tightly integrating with the freeIPA project, so that administrators will be able to authenticate, authorize, and audit their virtual resources across the enterprise.
Not a bad week.
About the author
Brian Stevens is Red Hat's Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for AI, where he drives the company's vision for an open, hybrid AI future. His work empowers enterprises to build and deploy intelligent applications anywhere, from the datacenter to the edge. As Red Hat’s CTO of Engineering (2001-2014), Brian was central to the company’s initial growth and the expansion of its portfolio into cloud, middleware, and virtualization technologies.
After helping scale Google Cloud as its VP and CTO, Brian’s passion for transformative technology led him to become CEO of Neural Magic, a pioneer in software-based AI acceleration. Red Hat’s strategic acquisition of Neural Magic in 2025 brought Brian back to the company, uniting his leadership with Red Hat's mission to make open source the foundation for the AI era.
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