SWSoft is putting its virtualization software into the open source community with the introduction of the Server Virtualization Open Source Project, or OpenVZ, which is freely available at the OpenVZ Web site.

OpenVZ is an operating system-level server virtualization solution that is built on Linux. It lets developers and administrators create virtual private servers from single physical servers. Each virtual private server is isolated from the others on the physical server and can be rebooted independently of others.

OpenVZ is a subset of SWSoft's Virtuozzo. Technologies developed from OpenVZ may be incorporated into Virtuozzo.

SWSoft is attempting to make OpenVZ a standard part of the Linux kernel. Red Hat will add OpenVZ to its freely downloadable Fedora version of Linux.

The advantage of OpenVZ is that it uses a single version of the Linux operating system for each of its virtual private servers, saving customers money on different versions for each virtual machine they want to implement. A number of vendors including Sun have deployed this approach. Sun's containers use a single version of the Solaris operating system.

SWSoft's OpenVZ could be challenged by Xen, the open source virtualization software being developed and supported by XenSource. Xen is presently being incorporated into Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Red Hat Linux.

OpenVZ is ruled by the General Public License (GPL) and is available for download here. It supports the x86_64 environment and supports the creation of as many as 100 virtual private servers on a single physical server.