Virtualization and Linux together can play a strong role in both the enterprise and on the client side, said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer of Dell Inc. in his keynote Wednesday at the Linuxworld Expo and Conference in Boston.

Kettler has been with Dell from 1996, first working in development for the client architecture and technology group. Prior to joining Dell, he spent 12 years at IBM's PC systems division. Kettler holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

"There's a significant shift in the industry relative to where we were a few years ago with virtualization," Kettler said.

Kettler acknowledged that much more work needs to be done in the next several years for users to reap the full benefits of virtualization, and he urged the Linux community to play a role in this process.

"I am making a call to action here, not just to I/O silicon vendors, but there are software, standards and interfaces for how this all comes together. There is a lot of work ahead to Flush this out for interoperability between hardware platforms and virtualized environments where you can put virtual machines onto quite disparate hardware platforms and all should mix and match together beautifully," Kettler said.

He also urged the software industry to "rethink" licensing agreements for virtualized environments.

Attendees at the LinuxWorld conference also see strides on the virtualization front.

"Virtualization as a concept has been around for a while, but with the advent of VMware there was a first wave of innovation and now with companies like with SWSoft, as an example, it seems like there are a whole wave of fresh stabs at virtualization," said Andrew Widdowson, with Bose Corp.

"We have already gone with VMware, but if we were in the same position now the choice would be much more difficult, Xen development is much more embraced now," said Timothy Antonowicz, systems administrator, Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. The school has virtualized about 60 percent of its environment, Antonowicz said.

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Prashanth Rai