Xen
With Xen virtualization, a thin software layer known as the Xen hypervisor is inserted between the server's hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more virtual servers, effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server.
Virtualization solutions based on Xen are gaining ground every day. All major Linux distributions feature the Xen hypervisor, some of them actively support the ongoing development effort. According to Xensource, Xen is the fastest and most secure virtualization technology. Xen can be downloaded from the Xensource download site. Downloads for Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise as well as Fedora are available from Xen. Xen is in Debian unstable. Gentoo Portage currently has xen-3.0.0 in testing. A live test CD of Xen 3.0 can also be downloaded and run without installation on computers with problematic hardware to check wheter or not they work.
For a small company with limited research and development budget such as ours, Xen is a powerful technology to test out new software without investing in hardware. We have compiled our notes into a small How To Setup a Gentoo Xen domain0.
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