The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has made significant gains in participation since its launch last spring - the group now has more than 240 members and has been further bolstered by the creation of the oVirt Project, writes Alan Radding in a BottomlineIT blog post, "OVA and oVIRT Drive KVM Success."

The goals of the OVA are to increase awareness, understanding, and adoption of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), encourage third-party solutions to be built around KVM. The new oVirt Project is an open virtualization project aimed at providing a server virtualization management system for KVM.

Radding quotes Jean Staten Healy, director, Worldwide Linux and Open Virtualization, IBM, who explained at a recent analyst briefing that effective enterprise virtualization demands more than a hypervisor alone. "In addition to a feature-rich hypervisor like KVM, Healy cited the need for well-defined APIs at all layers of the stack, readily accessible (reasonably priced) systems and tools, a corresponding feature-rich, heterogeneous management platform, and a robust ecosystem to extend the open hypervisor and management platform, all of which oVirt is tackling," writes Radding.