Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat have launched consulting services with two goals in mind: Improve the efficiency of virtualized environments while getting customers to switch from Oracle’s Sun Solaris to Linux. Still, the move raises a few virtualization and channel partner questions. Here’s why.

The HP-Red Hat relationship seems simple enough: HP offers the hardware infrastructure (ProLiant servers) and Red Hat offers the open source platforms — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

HP and Red Hat claim that a migration to their joint solution is based on industry-standard servers and the addition of open source software can lower the total cost of ownership, especially when compared to distributed application servers and traditional Sun Solaris environments. Bold claims, indeed.

Attacks against Solaris are hardly new. Ever since Oracle announced plans to acquire Sun, rivals like IBM, HP and Red Hat have been busy launching customer migration strategies that target the Solaris installed base. Still, Oracle says Sun’s business has returned to profitability.

The latest HP-Red Hat effort includes an holistic HP Migration Center, an HP-Red hat Migration Planner Service and an HP-Red Hat Virtualization Planning Service.

Still, those services raise a few questions. For starters: Is RHEV ready for prime-time? Red Hat ultimately expects RHEV virtualization to leapfrog VMware in terms of market share and popularity, but Red Hat concedes the RHEV offering trails VMware’s management tools.

Also, Red Hat has stated that RHEV is a prime opportunity for channel partners. The VAR Guy’s team wonders: Will Red Hat’s partners start running into HP’s direct sales team in the virtualization market? We’ll be watching.

Both HP and Red Hat have respective sites for the new partnership. Check them out at http://www.redhat.com/HP and http://www.hp.com/go/redhat.

Additional reporting by Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; f0ll0w The VAR Guy via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.