This page covers the efforts to integrate various virtualization technologies into Fedora.
Introduction
Virtualization allows one to run many guest virtual machines on top of a host operating system such as Fedora. What this means is that using one computer, you can mimic several individual computers and even run different operating systems in each of these virtual machines. There are many different virtualization technologies, including both free and open source software and proprietary offerings.
Fedora has also long included QEMU, a fast CPU emulator capable of virtualizing OS on both native and non-native architectures (such as allowing a PowerPC OS to run on x86_64).
Fedora Core 5 was the first release to include Xen virtualization, which supports paravirtualization of a modified operating system (OS), or, with hardware support, full virtualization of any native OS. Since Fedora 8, Fedora has not included Xen Dom0 support, pending the inclusion of said support in upstream Linux.
Fedora 7 was the first release to include support for KVM, which is a hypervisor included in the Linux kernel which requires hardware virtualization support like Intel VT or AMD-V. KVM is currently the main focus of Fedora's virtualization efforts. xenner is a utility which allows Xen guests to be run using KVM.
Yet another type of virtualization is the containers approach used by OpenVZ, which can partition a single OS into several isolated zones -- a chroot with much stronger resource isolation.
Anticipating this diversification of technology, management applications for Fedora have been built on top of the libvirt toolkit, which offers a technology independent API for managing virtual systems.