Quoting from ITJungle.com:

The OpenVZ virtualization project will today announce that one of the key goodies that has been shipping in the commercialized Virtuozzo virtualization tool for Linux and Windows will be made available to the open source OpenVZ community. That feature, called zero downtime migration, allows a running virtualized environment on one server to be transported on the fly to another server equipped with OpenVZ partitions.

The OpenVZ project was sponsored by SWsoft to help spur the adoption of its variant on the virtualization idea for servers. While the VMware and the open source Xen hypervisors create virtual machine partitions that run whole stacks of operating systems and their file systems and applications inside a partition, the Virtuozzo product that was created by SWsoft a number of years ago puts virtual machines atop a common kernel and file system. Each virtual machine thinks it is the whole machine, but it is just a trick of software. This is very much like the approach that Sun Microsystems took to create its Solaris containers in its Solaris 10 Unix variant and is similar to the "jails" that are used in the open source BSD Unix environment. SWsoft calls these containers "Virtual Private Servers" when running on its Virtuozzo virtualization software, which is available for Linux and Windows. In December 2005, SWsoft took the core hypervisor piece of its Virtuozzo product open source and created a project site for it called OpenVZ. The commercial Virtuozzo product includes the automation and management features that make OpenVZ a commercial-grade product that is worth some money. Virtuozzo also runs on Linux and Windows, while OpenVZ only runs on Linux.

Both SLES 10, due in May or so, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, due at the end of the year, are expected to use something very close to the official Linux 2.6.16 kernel, but how close they get depends on a lot of factors--including how other virtualization features such as the Xen hypervisor are woven into the fabric of these two dominant Linux distributions.

Of course, the people behind the OpenVZ project think that for many customers, the VMware and Xen approaches, where the entire stack is virtualized and run on a separate kernel, is overkill. To be sure, admits Kolyshkin, some customers want to run Solaris, Windows, Linux, and NetWare on the same machine for development, but in production, he says companies tend to pick one operating system platform per machine and then they want to virtualize that to drive up utilization. "In many cases, it just doesn't make sense to run multiple operating system kernels."

Read the entire article, here.