OStatic

Hypervisors - bare-metal virtualization solutions that don't depend on an underlying operating system - used to be the high-priced spread of the virtualization world. You can still pay a pretty penny for hypervisor solutions from some vendors. But an announcement from Sun yesterday increases the pressure on purely-commercial solutions: Sun's own xVM Server is now open source.

As virtualization technology becomes more pervasive and starts to make its way into the operating system, it seems that more and more vendors want to get their slice of this particular pie. Now Linux vendor Red Hat has joined the fray, announcing its own embedded hypervisor at its annual user conference.