RED HAT has paid $107 million to acquire an Israeli company that specializes in virtualisation technologies.

Qumranet is best known for developing the open-source KVM Linux kernel extension. According to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, KVM functions as a "bare-metal" hypervisor – running directly on underlying hardware and hosting guest operating systems.

Hypervisors, or virtual machine monitors, allow various operating systems to run simultaneously on a single processor.

Qumranet is also responsible for the creation of Solid ICE, a virtual desktop infrastructure capable of hosting multiple virtual Windows and Linux desktop operating systems.

The acquisition marked a major strategic shift for the first tier Linux vendor, which had previously focused its virtualization efforts on Xen – a rival open-source hypervisor owned by Citrix Systems.

Nevertheless, Red Hat has pledged to support Xen for Enterprise Linux 5 users until at least 2014. µ