OT ... the new buzz word: virtualization

["Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@xxxxxxx>]

Everyone seems to be jumping onto this one lately, and I'm curious as to 
exactly what it means, and what it can do ...

Du to the work that has been done on the whole VFS layer, specifically the 
plans towards fixing unionfs, my plan is to eventually move my servers 
from FreeBSD 4.x to DragonFlyBSD (when, of course, depends on that unionfs 
code *nudge nudge* *wink wink*) ...

All of our clients use jail'd environments, and I've had one ask about 
switching to using Xen ... other then being able to run other OSs (which I 
don't want to do), I can't really see benefits, and only the drawback of 
the extra overhead I would imagine would be inherent with something like 
that, which I imagine would have its own kernel, and therefore, use more 
memory resources then our current jail'd environments ...

So, I guess my question is what exactly is virtualization? Is it *just* a 
way of running multiple operating systems on one box, and that is the only 
thing that makes use of it ... or woudl the operating system itself, 
without any "extra software" make some sort of use of that sort of thing? 
Is there some sort of performance benefit to it?

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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@xxxxxxx           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664