Linux vendor Red Hat will give an update on its virtualization initiatives March 14 at an event in San Francisco hosted by Tim Yeaton, Red Hat's executive vice president of enterprise solutions, and Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at the Raleigh, N.C., company.

Also attending the event will be representatives from strategic hardware partners Intel and AMD, sources have told eWEEK.

While the company declined to comment ahead of the event, Red Hat has been aggressively working on getting the Xen virtualization technology ready to be submitted for merging into the Linux kernel.

Xen lets multiple copies of Linux run on the same computer through its virtualization technology, and is a "hypervisor"—software that manages a computer's hardware resources so they can be shared by multiple operating systems.

A range of hardware and software improvements underway means that Xen also will be able to work with the Microsoft Windows and Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating systems and run on computers using IBM Power, Intel Itanium and Sun Sparc, as well as those that are x86-based.

Red Hat officials have said that they will incorporate the Xen project's Xen 3.0 server virtualization capabilities into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 product, which is expected to ship in the second half of this year, while major OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM have said they will also support the technology.

The open-source Xen project, based at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in England, in December released Xen 3.0, which offered new features aimed at large SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) environments.

Around the same time XenSource, a company created in early 2005 by the initial developers of Xen, released its first commercial product, dubbed XenOptimizer, designed to help users manage their Xen virtualized environments.

XenSource officials argue that while the Xen hypervisor technology is free, companies like theirs will be able to make money by offering management and related software on top of Xen.