Xen and the art of making cars

Virtualization. It's the buzz word today. Everybody wants to virtualize, even if they don't know what does that mean. Few days ago Novell announced that BMW group will use SuSE and Xen to consolidate servers and save money.

Ok, I fully agree that you may want to consolidate for many reasons:

• Servers are usually underutilized
• Single point of management
• Live migration
• Saving space in the racks
• Saving money

but I can't agree with this sentence:

The BMW Group is taking advantage of what the market is just discovering, that Xen open source virtualization software fully integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a viable alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions, providing high performance at a lower cost

said by Roger Levy, vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell: the main reason why you want to have an open source virtualization engine is that you simply can't trust enough proprietary solutions to run your servers. It's a matter of trustworthiness and freedom, not a matter of money.