Cloud computing, the latest and greatest trend of the IT world, has become a central element of Ubuntu’s server strategy.  With this development in mind, I’ve given some thought lately to how much of my electronic life actually depends on access to “the cloud.”

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After placing its bets for years on Xen, Red Hat moved recently towards official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.  Here’s a look at what this change might mean for Ubuntu, which has promoted KVM from the beginning.

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Improving boot time has been a focus of Ubuntu developers in recent releases, with the goal of a ten-second startup set for Ubuntu 10.4.  To test progress thus far, I compared boot performance for Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and 9.10.  Below are the results, which demonstrate the impressive strides that have been made thus far towards a faster boot.

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After a month of debate and experimentation, my employer has made the decision to use the open-source KVM virtualization infrastructure for migrating IT resources to a virtualized environment.  Below, I discuss why we chose KVM over its (mostly proprietary) alternatives.

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When Mark Shuttleworth announced the future Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala, the goals he outlined for the server version were all to do with cloud computing but you might be asking ‘What is cloud computing ?’ I answer this question and investigate what it can do for Ubuntu?

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The next major production release of Ubuntu — version 8.04 LTS, codenamed Hardy Heron — will ship with KVM as its virtualization package. This choice is surprising to those of us who have been watching the Xen virtualization package become the darling of Virtual Machine world. So let’s try to make sense out of the KVM virtual machine and this recent choice by Ubuntu.

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