Some netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs are shipped with compact operating systems designed to boot particularly quickly. Among those offering such systems are BIOS and firmware specialist Phoenix Technologies.

Not long after I covered Splashtop, the instant-on Linux-based boot environment that runs from flash memory, it looks like other hardware makers are getting into the same game. Meet Phoenix's Linux-based HyperSpace.

In Torture-Testing Phoenix HyperSpace, the Linux-Based Instant-On OS, we learned a bit about Phoenix HyperSpace, the Linux-based "instant on" operating system.

Hewlett-Packard will buy Linux-based quick-boot OS and client virtualization assets from Phoenix Technologies for US$12 million, Phoenix said on Thursday.

A couple of days ago, I read this on Matthew Garrette’s blog, where he tells us about a vendor’s BIOS trying to figure out the OS type/version and setting things around on deciding the OS it is running.

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn't be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based Web applications.

Joel Sweatte, director of IT at East Carolina University's College of Technology and Computer Science, recently asked the vendor of an engineering analysis application about its support for VMware's virtualization software. The company told him that it didn't have a virtualization support policy and that he should call back if the application didn't work.

Virtualization has long been the domain of large enterprises. Beginning with time-sharing technology on massive mainframes, virtualization required large data centers and larger IT budgets.

Red Hat has been talking about its new virtualization strategy for much of 2009. Today, the Linux vendor is making good on that talk with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor (RHEF-H) as well as a management platform (RHEV-M).