Many of us have heard about hardware virtualization, but as far as I can see there is still a lot of confusion around this term and surrounding technologies, so today I've decided to give a really quick intro. Some time in the future, I'll probably cover this topic in detail.

Sun Microsystems has just announced the agreement to acquire innotek, a Germany-based provider of an open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox.

Just a few weeks ago, Sun had introduced xVM – a family of virtualization solutions based on the technology of open source project called Xen. Recent builds of OpenSolaris have full support for xVM, which means that you can activate it by booting Solaris in a special mode (it's a separate menu item in your [...]