One of the hot topics at this year’s Linuxworld conference was virtualization, the abstraction of hardware to provide higher utilization, increased availability and easier management.
The open source Xen project (http://www.xensource.com/) provides software that partitions a physical server into several virtual servers. Xen uses a unique approach they call “para-virtualization” that provides much better performance than other virtual pc systems. Xen has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel and is being embraced by the Linux community. For more information look at:
http://lwn.net/Articles/144765/
http://lwn.net/Articles/139964/
I will talk about the ideas of server and data center virtualization and demonstrate using Xen to run several virtual machines on a server. If I can get it to work, I will show the live migration of a running virtual machine from one system to another without interrupting running programs.