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, in his keynote Wednesday at the Linuxworld Expo and Conference in Boston.

"Linux is bound by traditional operating system-to-platforms ties, and virtualization can set it free. Virtualization opens up opportunities for unique software applications and environments to reside on a single platform," Kettler said.

While the concept of virtualization is not new, it is attracting renewed interest because of technological advances such as the emergence of multicore processors, forthcoming multiple-resource I/O capabilities, and virtualization technologies built into next-generation processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, Kettler said.

"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.

On the enterprise side, Kettler said Linux has moved from the network edge to the data center and is now being used for some critical business applications. As an example, he talked about how Dell is using Linux in supercomputers and within its own business for critical applications such as supply chain management.

Kettler said virtualization will play a key role in Dell’s "scalable enterprise" strategy by giving businesses a cleaner approach to reallocating hardware resources for applications based on demand.

"There are tools and software to do this today, but with a virtualized environment we begin to get much cleaner around how we wrap and package things, and redeployment and reuse becomes phenomenal," Kettler said.

While virtualization has until now been driven by enterprise needs, Kettler predicted that’s about to change with a shift toward virtualization on the client side. He showed how client-side virtualization could allow users to run multiple operating systems to improve productivity, provide secure Web browsing and enhance digital entertainment in such areas as gaming.