Enterprise but free of charge virtualization solution

Few months ago I dediced to implement in my company virtualization solution for Linux. I tought it may be possible to save some money, make better hardware utilization and improve time-to-market for new projects. It took me a while to have a complete solution so I dediced to share my experience.

In my opinion enterprise virtualization provides:
- high availability (a cluster ?)
- acceptable performance
- templates for Linux OS
- possibility of using corporate standard of separated networks dedicated for

• serving service
• administration (let's say a console)
• NAS
• backup solution

- data is stored using SAN for high availability and performance
- hot (live) migration of virtual domains
- consolidated backup
- VLAN tagging support

I dediced to use RedHat Linux 5, which is a standard linux distribution in my company.
All the features are possible to implement using RHEL5 but it is relatively complicated to have all of them working together.

In next few weeks I hope to show how to build such solution without spending money on dedicated software.