Red Hat is seeking to drive a wedge between Cisco and its ally VMware. It has supported Cisco's server effort since the first UCS boxes started shipping last summer and Cisco wants to be the king of virtualization. So now Red Hat has integrated Cisco's Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology with its kernel-based KVM virtualization.

VN-Link is UCS' way of keeping tabs on the network traffic in and out of virtual machines. It automates the movement of network and storage services so they can follow virtual machines as they move around the datacenter, helping to ensure consistent policy-driven network capabilities across all servers, physical or virtual, in a data center.

Paul Cormier, the head of Red Hat's products and technology, says it's an emerging standard. He also says, thumbing his nose in VMware's direction, that his hardware and software integration with the widgetry is tighter than VMware's software-only integration and that this makes a big difference in performance, visibility, control, TCO and ROI.

Supposedly it won't be as easy for VMware to do.

Cisco and Red Hat will have the integrated widgetry in hand later this year when Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 becomes available.

Among other things, the tight integration is supposed to mean that large-scale cloud deployment can achieve more consistent network management, security and isolation. And customers could lower their acquisition costs by up to 20%-40% compared to Microsoft and VMware.

The Cisco and Red Hat people at the announcement said they didn't know what percentage of the UCS installed base uses Red Hat but they do have a common customer with 500 blades.