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Virtualization is also useful in terms of trying out different operating systems without having to configure dual boot environments. For example, you can try out Ubuntu Linux without having to re-partition the disk, shut down Fedora Linux and then boot from Ubuntu Linux. You simply start up a virtualized version of Ubuntu as a guest operating system.
There are a number of ways to implement virtualization on Fedora. Options include VMware and KVM. One of the most popular technologies on Fedora is called Xen. Red Hat engineers have invested considerable effort into making Xen easy to install, configure and manage on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Many of these improvements appeared in Fedora 7. For these reasons, this chapter will focus on Xen Virtualization in Fedora and will assume you are using Fedora 7 or laterFedora 8. Unfortunately, support for running Xen based virtualization on Fedora releases 9, 10 and 11 is not supported. Whilst it is possible to run these versions of Fedora inside virtual machines (as a domU), these Fedora releases cannot be used to host Xen based virtual machines (dom0). It is hoped that this support will return with the introduction Xen 3.4 in Fedora 12. If you are using one of these versions of Fedora we recommend using KVM virtualization as outlined in the chapter entitled [[Installing and Configuring Fedora KVM Virtualization]].
For a complete online book dedicated to Xen based virtualization we recommend [[virtuatopia:Xen Virtualization Essentials|Xen Virtualization Essentials]].
