Red Hat has claimed that its new open source virtualisation platform, RHEV3, would provide a strong alternative to VMware.

The company said that RHEV3 would offer greater flexibility, improved performance with the KVM hypervisor platform and more server headroom than VMware.

Navin Thadani, senior director of virtualisation business at Red Hat, said that the latest version of the RHEV was released the high demand for a more flexible substitute to VMware.

Speaking on the topic, Thadani said, “We have been shipping RHEV for more than two years and since then we have spoken to hundreds of customers. One thing that is exceedingly clear is that there is a strong demand for an alternative to VMware."

While VMware is based on a proprietary kernel, RHEV3 has been developed and launched with all-Linux stack. The company said it would be ideal base for the Linux constituency.

Red Hat further said that it aimed to make the RHEV technology 60-90 per cent cheaper than its comparable VMware vSphere 5 solutions.

RHEV has been priced at $499 per socket a year on servers with standard business hour support. For 24x7 premium support, it costs $749 per socket a year.