The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) launched by the company Qumranet in 2006 was officially adopted in the Linux kernel 2.6.20 in early 2007. In the following year, Qumranet was bought by the Linux distributor RedHat. To further develop the technology, RedHat founded the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) with IBM. This alliance included companies such as SUSE, Intel, and HP.
KVM is closely linked with the emulation software QEMU. QEMU mostly provides functions for virtualizing the hardware, while Linux KVM manages the allocation of resources from the host system. This is why the term KVM/QEMU is often used. Since KVM is integral to Linux, this virtualization solution cannot be used on Windows computers. However, Windows is supported as a guest system along with most Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD. While KVM is standard in most Linux distributions, it still needs to be enabled.