In the middle of the great discussions and conferences taking place at JBoss World, Orlando, Red Hat quietly leaked out the first cut of what is likely to influence the future of virtualization. Project oVirt. oVirt’s aim is to transform the host virtualization layer into a small stateless image which can be embedded on FLASH, or booted off a CD or PXE. No local disks needed. No installs. A physical server can become a virtual server just by booting oVirt.

oVirt also includes a new web management console which can manage any libvirt-based virtualization system. Whether that be one personal system, or the enterprise. It is no accident that oVirt is tightly integrating with the freeIPA project, so that administrators will be able to authenticate, authorize, and audit their virtual resources across the enterprise.

Not a bad week.