Ross is a spokesman for Nortel and spoke about [http://www.xen.org/ XEN] Virtualization. Ross presented to me the idea that virtualization can save business a LARGE amount of money, by allowing a company to harvest all the CPU cycles they possibly can.

eg. Company XYZ has 100 client machines running for employees during the daytime, and a powerful server running massive amounts of batch processing to run during the evening. Along side of these two main tasks, are other services such as intranet web hosting, company VoIP management, etc, all on dedicated machines

Virtualization can give you the dedicated Operating System needed AND it can provide one piece of software to control all CPU cycle time. One virtualization core can spawn off guest machines as needed for employees during the daytime, re-harvesting their cycles during the evening for another guest machine spawned to run batch during the evening. Separate virtual machines can be spawned for the intranet and other services as needed.

XEN is a very large project, and hundreds of developers have contributed to various internal projects contained within its boundaries. Ross explained how Novell was working hand in hand with Microsoft to provide fully supported XEN Linux->Windows solutions.