Virtualization and Open Source

Abstract
Virtualization dates back to 1960’s when IBM introduced VM/370 to counter high hardware prices. The technology lost its sheen in 1980’s and 1990’s with the advent of low cost hardware and multitasking operating systems. Although modern servers were less expensive and more powerful there were other factors like administration, maintenance and cost associated with failures and system breaches. Therefore in 2000 virtualization got a new life and now is a technology in demand with big players like VMware and Microsoft in the field. Till now virtualization has been the forte of proprietary players. Although there are many good open source alternatives available but commercial organizations have been reluctant to adopt those. This paper tries to outline advantages of open source virtualization products and studies three open source alternatives which have capability to move abreast with proprietary software.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Virtual Machine Monitor
3. Applications
4. Choices
5. Major Virtualization Open Source Software
 i. QEMU
 ii. Xen
 iii. User Mode Linux(UML)
6. Reference