The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora.
There is alot of similar technology going around these days (Solaris Zones, IBM Power5 HW Virtualization, etc.) I even remember hearing that MS bought a Virtual PC maker…
As a SysAdmin, I think this is how we will deploy servers / services in the future. Rather than having a single monolithic OS that provides all services, perhaps we will deploy discreet highly specialized OS’s to serve a specific purpose (SQL, Web, Mail, etc) – all of course running from on a common hardware platform.
This would probably make most IT infrastructures easier to manage and secure.
And i can only recommend it. Xen does away with the last problem with this kind of deployment: performance.
Its very refreshing if someone comes to you and tells you that we need a several new mailing lists and you can just bootstrap a new debian/gentoo/netbsd/whatever vm and get mailman going. What is that? We are launching a new product based around mailing lists and need hundreds more? Alright let me just migrate this vm on its dedicated server…
“Work on Xen has been supported by UK EPSRC grant GR/S01894, Intel Research, HP Labs and Microsoft Research.”
So Microsoft is funding a GPL project?!
> So Microsoft is funding a GPL project?!
They did stop.
Linux announced the new Linux version at the CeBit trade show in Germany on Thursday. The cost in Europe–where SuSE Linux sales are strongest–will be 74 euros (US$99), but U.S. pricing won’t be set until closer to the product launch date, Mancusi-Ungaro said.
Is that not called price-fixing?
No, its not price fixing. If they collaborated with other Linux vendors to artificially jack up the price of all Linux distributions, that would be price fixing.