Via OSNews: Xen virtualization has been merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.  This is a hot topic at the moment, if you’ll pardon the pun, because of all the physical — space and energy — problems that real-world data centers are running into today.  Virtualization of computing/processing power — like the virtualization of storage and so forth — is one answer to this problem.  Virtualization, though, creates other problems, especially including the management of virtualized machines.  In some ways, managing VMs is harder than managing actual boxes; it has been a major stumbling block in the adoption of processor virtualization, one which Novell’s Orchestrator product neatly solves.

(Yes, graybeards, I know that virtualization has been around on mainframes and other platforms since time immemorial.)