Chapter 9. Virtualization

One of the hottest trends in system administration today is virtualization. With virtualization you can create multiple instances of Ubuntu that all run on the same hardware. You can allocate parts of your server’s resources to each virtual machine. There are incredible amounts of processing power in a modern server, and with virtualization you can get much more out of the hardware you have. I even used virtual machines as a test lab for this book; it is much faster to set up a new Ubuntu server and try out a particular package when you can do so within a virtual machine rather than setting aside multiple hardware machines.

There are a number of different virtualization technologies available under Ubuntu Server, and in this chapter I cover two of the most popular, VMware Server and KVM. VMware Server is a free product produced by VMware, and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is free software with support built into the Linux kernel. Finally I discuss some of the new Cloud features available to Ubuntu Server.