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Virtualization is the creation of virtual (rather than actual) web servers that include autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and work loads.

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module.It supports Linux, Windows, Solaris, and BSD guests. It runs on x86 and x86-64 systems with hardware supporting virtualization extensions.

OpenVZ is container-based virtualization for Linux. OpenVZ creates multiple secure, isolated containers (otherwise known as VEs or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each container performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; a container can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

Xen is a hypervisor that supports x86, x86_64, Itanium, and ARM architectures, and can run Linux, Windows, Solaris, and some of the BSDs as guests on their supported CPU architectures. It's supported by a number of companies, primarily by Citrix, but also used by Oracle for Oracle VM, and by others. Xen can do full virtualization on systems that support virtualization extensions, but can also work as a hypervisor on machines that don't have the virtualization extensions.