I’ve been working on the design of virtualization environments lately and believe me if you run Linux or any other flavour and you’re looking for a solution the choice of hypervisors and emulators are so large that you are bound to be confused or spend countless hours researching the right solution. Virtualization is now moving in two directions namely Server Virtualization/Consolidation and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure so you should first of all identify your requirements . The major players are VMWare with a portfolio of solutions, Citrix Xen, Red Hat KVM and RHEV and SUN with their VDI Solution (I am excluding XVM as it is based on Xen and VirtualBox because it is an emulator). A very promising player to watch is Ulteo in the VDI field but like Red Hat RHEV there is a dependency on a Windows Server. Red Hat RHEV solution which came from the acquisition of Qumranet still depends on Windows Server for management but Red Hat has promised to get rid of this dependency as soon as they can and we know from Red Hat past acquisition history that they are true to the open source philosophy so watch out. I was really impressed with the upcoming Red Hat RHEV solution so I have included a small video of the management interface. I run a large farm of Xen Servers so I am dying to migrate to KVM but unfortunately KVM is production ready only in Fedora 11 or RHEL 5.4 and I don’t want to have to maintain a separate branch/release of KVM on servers based on my experience. I just have to wait patiently for CentOS to release a stable recent version (KVM support is very old in CentOS 5.3) to make the move. I have tested KVM on both Fedora 11 and RHEL 5.4 so I know that I can derive better performance from KVM. Of course this is a question of choice as you may prefer Xen over KVM.