I wrote about virtualization technology being added to the kernel before. I mentioned KVM being added to the kernel but today, Howtoforge presents a guide on how to setup OpenVZ, another virtualization technology for Linux, on your server.

I predict that virtualization will be big this coming 2007 with big hitters like VMWare and Microsoft (VirtualPC) providing server-based, non-free solutions but open source projects such as OpenVZ, Xen and Solaris's Containers challenging them.

Personally, I have Parallels Desktop running on Ubuntu and my Mac OS X. I also have VMWare Fusion running on my Mac, but it is on a trial stage. Virtualization allows me to test different Linux distributions without messing up my main OS. I can have several virtual machines running a web-server, Database server, file server and application server, all with its own IP address. Cool, huh?