One of the areas in which open-source software has truly come into its own during the last few years is virtualization. The latest LTS release of Ubuntu, which offers a variety of Free virtualization solutions, makes this abundantly clear. Below, we take a look at some of those options, with a focus on KVM, and consider their meaning for Ubuntu users.
The technology for creating virtual machines has been around in one form or another for decades. As recently as 2006 or 2007, however, there were few free and open-source virtualization solutions that were ready for production environments.
Xen existed, but it wasn’t entirely open source at that time, and it only worked well with Linux guests. KVM was merged into the Linux kernel in early 2007, but it didn’t mature for a while after that. And while innotek open-sourced VirtualBox around the same time, VB is only really useful for desktop users; it’s also not completely Free.
As a result, proprietary virtualization offerings were the only realistic choice for most large organizations for a long time. VMware enjoyed a near-monopoly in the enterprise market, with some competition from companies like Sun and Microsoft, but no strong open-source contenders.
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http://www.workswithu.com/2010/06/09/open-source-virtualization-comes-of...