Maybe you have never heard of virtualization. If you haven’t, you will. Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement to the average PC user. If you don’t hear about it, you will probably end up using a virtualized computer or server. You may not know it’s virtualized, but you will most likely end up using one. Virtualization can be difficult to understand at first. Let’s try to explain it a bit.

Let’s take a typical server. When I say server here I am referring to server hardware and server software running on it. In the traditional scenario, you have a one to one relationshi between hardware and software. For example, you buy some nice Xeon processor server hardware and you put, oh, let’s say, Windows 2003 server on it. You have to monkey around with drivers and hardware compatibility, etc. Now, let’s say that you wanted to virtualize. With virtualization, you could run multiple virtual servers on that one physical server hardware. They would all run in their own virtualized space through a virtualization layer. This allows you to do some pretty amazing things. Now you can administer virtualized servers like you would other objects. You can drag and drop them. You can move them to different physical servers with different hardware without ill affects. In any case, that’s a non-technical view, but a pretty good starting point.

Most people got to VMWare, as they are the defacto leader in virtualization. At least, that’s the word on the street. I’ve worked with the software and it’s pretty nice. But there are also some open source linux options out there and I wanted to highlight a few. Open VZ is “an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual environments — VEs (otherwise known as virtual private servers, or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VE performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VEs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.” This software is brought to you by SWSoft – the makers of Plesk control panel and Virtuozzo.

Another such project is VirtualBox. VirtualBox ” is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)… Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.”

And Convirt is a project that was “concieved with the goal of tackling the administrative and infrastructure management challenges that adoption of virtualization platforms presents to the traditional datacenter. The XenMan administrative console is project ConVirt’s first release. XenMan is an intuitive, graphical management tool aimed at operational lifecycle management for the Xen virtualization platform. XenMan is built on the firm design philosophy that ease-of-use and sophistication can, and should, co-exist in a single management tool. So, XenMan should hopefully prove valuable to both seasoned Xen Administrators as well as those just seeking an introduction to Xen Virtualization”

I’m sure there are others – pipe in if you know of a good one.

**Update

KVM is the Kernel Virtual Machine open source initiative from and Israeli based startup called Qumranet.  KVM is “a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. KVM also requires a modified QEMU although work is underway to get the required changes upstream. Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20.”

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