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Open source goliath Red Hat, said Friday that it will be buying over Qumranet, a privately held company behind KVM ( Kernel Virtual Machine) virtualisation technology for USD 107 million.

Besides the KVM, the buyout will also include Qumranet's SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which Red Hat hopes will advance its efforts to transform the virtualization market and drive comprehensive virtualization technology and management solutions into every system.

More importantly, this partnership means that Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat will now be able to offer a virtualized platform to Windows desktop consumers without having to play nice with Microsoft.

“This acquisition furthers our capability to widen the gap between open source and proprietary infrastructure software. Put simply, Qumranet's KVM and VDI technologies are at the forefront of the next generation of virtualization. They represent an opportunity to raise the bar and meet the market's demand for virtualization solutions,” said Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO at Red Hat.

Red Hat said the acquisition does not spell the end for the Xen hypervisor as of yet. It will continue to support Xen until 2014.