For the last couple of yeas, one of the most popular posts on my blog was a price and feature comparison of Red Hat’s RHEV product, driven largely by people searching for “RHEV download” and similar phrases.

The simple reason for this was Red Hat’s unwillingness to let RHEV out of their hands and into the hands of people who just wanted to try the thing out, and see what it was like, without engaging in a proof of concept project with Red Hat’s sales team. You simply couldn’t get a trial RHEV without begging your local sales rep, making RHEV the most closed source product at the open source Red Hat.

Now it looks like things are changing for RHEV, with Red Hat re-launching the oVirt project, seeding it with the code from RHEV.

As described on the About oVirt page:

The project has been seeded with assets from Red Hat by open sourcing it’s virtualization management software (RHEV), and from partners, customers, and competitors to build an open virtualization community to enable the growth and adoption of open virtualization solutions.

Now that people can finally get to see what’s behind Red Hat’s sales website on RHEV, I think there’ll be a lot more people trying out the solution in small scale projects, which will hopefully (for Red Hat at least), lead to more production implementations.