Most of the time when you talk about virtualization these days, you are talking about hardware virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer), application virtualization (SoftGrid/App-V, Citrix, VMware ThinApp), or desktop virtualization (VDI). One topic I don’t think gets very much press is OS virtualization. OS virtualization allows you to have 1 copy of an OS (say Microsoft Windows Server) and create several “containers” that appear to be their own unique OS. Each container OS shares common resources with the host OS. You can even specify which hotfixes show up in which containers. What’s cool about this type of virtualization is the scalability factor. You can get quite a bit more virtual containers per physical server than you can with hardware virtualization. However, you are locked in to the same OS.

Currently, there are only 2 major players in the OS virtualization space - Sun (Solaris Containers or Zones) and Parallels (Virtuozzo Containers). Sun Containers is only for Solaris. Parallels does not have this limitation, so Parallels is pretty much the only player in this market. That is, until now. A new player named iCore Software has enter this space with iCore Virtual Accounts. Right now, this technology is only for Windows XP, so it is on a lower end than Parallels, but it may show some promise.

Continue at virtualization.info for more details…

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