By the end of the year Linux has promised to bring a virtualization technology in order to increase server efficiency.

The idea of virtual memory has been around on the market for some time now. Operating system virtualization allows an entire hosted or, guest, operating system to run under the control of a supervising master program named hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM). This type of virtualization can allow multiple separate virtual machines to run at the same time on a single computer or can even allow a running VM to migrate between host computers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5 is going to include a major virtualization component Running multiple operating systems increases efficiency and it’s coming now on the market especially for x86 servers.

The two giants, AMD and Intel have already started a campaign of adding features in order to improve virtualization performance and abilities. With this new technology, system management costs should be lower and also, savings should come up in what space, power or cooling means.

The new Fedora Core, version 5 uses Xen technology and already supports Intel’s latest technology regarding virtualization and will probably support AMD’s as well, as both companies are Red Hat partners. The integration of Xen in Linux took longer than Red Hat expected, as Xen turns out to be harder to establish.

Meanwhile, running multiple operating systems is not the only thing Red Hat has in mind as they are also interested in dividing a single instance of an operating system so it looks as if were several. This technology is to be integrated in the free version of Linux and is brought to Red Hat by SWsofts’s OpenVZ.

So far, Red Hat has not signed any business relationship with XenSource, the maker of Xen but it seems more than obvious that such a partnership is going to become reality sometime soon.