I’ve been watching Xen for a while now, and I’m nearly ready to take the jump and do some testing with it. I’m thinking about ordering a cheap Athlon 64 box for home to use as a testbed for the lightweight server concept that I’ve been kicking around for years. In the 18 months that have passed since I last talked about it, virtualization on the PC has advanced by leaps and bounds; at the time, I was looking at UML, which wasn’t really fast or stable enough. Xen looks to be both fast and stable, and it has a clear migration path onto the virtualization hardware offered by the next generation of PC hardware. That makes it nearly ideal for my purposes.