Last week at the VMworld 2007 in San Fransisco, VMWare announced that they have released the majority of the VMWare tools for Linux as open source software. Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) is hosted at http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net, and the source code is available for download. This will allow Linux vendors to integrate VMware Tools into upcoming versions of the Linux operating system distributions. This helps make Linux a more stable virtualization platform and will simplify deploying of guest operating systems. Because of this exciting announcment I would like to talk a bit about virtualization on Linux.

What is virtualization?
Virtualization allows a host computer to run many different guest operating systems and applications at the same time. The virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with other installed virtual machines. This allows us to "virtualize" the hardware resources, including hard drive, ram, network controller, as if the virtual machine where installed on it's own machine. Virtual machines make it possible for, say a Windows host operating system to run Linux from inside Windows.

What does virtualization allow us to do?
Virtualization has many benefits and uses. Testing software applications on different operating system versions has been a common use for virtual machines in the past. As virtual machine popularity increases however, we see more mainstream uses of virtualization such as running Windows and Windows applications inside Linux. Probably one of the most exciting uses is its use for virtual servers and virtual hosting in the hosting market. This allows a server machine to host to run multiple virtual machines acting as servers. Amazon EC2 has already been working on this concept for some time. Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. This makes a cheap, secure and highly configurable option for hosting high availability applications such as webservers, database and appservers. With the release of the VMWare Open Virtual Machine, we will see more and more of this kind of implementation used as it will make it easier to run and install virtual machines.

A look at other Virtual Machine Tools.
There are several other open source Virtual Machine applications as well. Below are a few to check out.

VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org/
Xen - http://www.xensource.com/Pages/default.aspx
Bochs - http://bochs.sourceforge.net/