It is increasingly obvious that the battle for computing dominance will be played out in an arena that is not going to be obvous to the average home user and partially obvious to the corporate user – in the virtualisation space. Why? The piece of code that sits between the hardware and anything above it will decide on how the whole stack will perform. Xen and KVM are two really promising technologies with Xen having a lot of testing being done in the Fedora 5/6 space and for enterprise use in RHEL5.

KVM is likely to reach test stage in Fedora 7, but with the universal API to manage virtualiztion, LibVirt, I think the stage is set for a rapid innovation and maturation of these technologies.

I am also really glad that someone like Moshe Bar (of the OpenMosix fame) is leading part of the KVM charge. His KVM startup Qumranet is probably best poised to make this a serious contender to the virtualization crown, though I think it would be best if we can merge all of these technologies into one. Perhaps Moshe has found something in Xen that he thinks is not good enough and so had to go with the KVM route, but let’s see.