Red Had is working on something big in an attempt to snatch some market share from VMware, the EMC subsidiary currently sitting on the throne of the virtualization space. The Linux distributor teamed up with Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp and SuSE to jump start the oVirt Project, a pluggable hypervisor manager for KVM built on the RHEV-M stack. The latter is available to oVirt under an an Apache Software Foundation license.

“The idea behind oVirt is to give people who want an alternative to VMware more than just the choice of going with a Red-Hat subscription for RHEV-M or using Microsoft’s Hyper-V,” the Register reports.

The open-source initiative is set to do so by creating an open ecosystem of plug-in partners around oVirt. The “the first open and openly governed community” will put a big emphasis on the first element, unlike RackSpace that “owns” its partnership ecosystem, according to  Red Hat technical director Carl Trielo.

While this project is still only starting out, Red Hat hopes to expand its partner list at first by getting support from some of the members of the Open Virtualization Alliance. The company made a similar move to boost KVM not too long ago.

oVirt will launch in early November at a workshop day hosted by Cisco at its San Jose campus.

The open-source cloud industry is growing fast, especially in light of two major developments this week.  In addition to oVirt, OpenStack too had a launch. An early version of the latest distribution, dubbed Diablo, was released.

The latest versions of OpenStack Compute, OpenStack Object Storage, and OpenStack Image Service: nicknamed Nova, Swift and Glance respectively, introduce several major improvements. That includes a few highly requested search functions added to Glance, and a high-availability networking mode added to OpenStack Object Storage, among other thing.