Qualcomm, the wireless chip specialist, appears to be a poster child for Red Hat’s enterprise software strategy. Indeed, Qualcomm plans to leverage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) to increase production workloads. Qualcomm’s move comes as most large enterprises try to choose between VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix virtualization. Here are some details.

Red Hat’s press release says Qualcomm’s relationship with Red Hat is nothing new. Back in 2003 Qualcomm adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then became active in beta testing RHEV in 2009, in which scalability and performance density were key features. RHEV is based on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), an open source alternative to VMware.

Qualcomm is now deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 as their base operating system, and Qualcomm plans to leverage KVM to deploy RHEV as a guest OS as well.

Battling on Multiple Fronts

Bigger picture here? Qualcomm is no small company, and this is a potential “win” for the Red Hat camp amid the virtualization wars. While VMware remains the market leader, Microsoft claims its Hyper-V hypervisor is gaining market share rapidly, and upstarts like Oracle are preparing road shows to promote their own virtualization efforts.

Red Hat, in stark contrast, thinks its RHEV strategy will eventually leapfrog VMware the way Linux ultimately leapfrogged Sun Solaris and other Unix distributions. Is Red Hat right? Qualcomm seems to think so, but thousands of accounts remain loyal to VMware…

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