A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a computer operating system for the x86 family of personal computers. It is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU GPL and other free and open-source licenses. It was designed to run graphical user interface applications on older PC hardware, for example, machines with 486 and early Pentium microprocessors and very little random-access memory (RAM). DSL is a live CD with a size of 50 megabytes (MB). What originally began as an experiment to see how much software could fit in 50 MB eventually became a full Linux distribution. It can be installed on storage media with small capacities, like bootable business cards, USB flash drives, various memory cards, and Zip drives.
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the technology and systems involved, or a specialized device built for such functionality.
9P is a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of connecting the components of a Plan 9 system. Files are key objects in Plan 9. They represent windows, network connections, processes, and almost anything else available in the operating system.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates a computer's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one processor architecture to run on another.
OS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) virtualization paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances, including containers, zones, virtual private servers (OpenVZ), partitions, virtual environments (VEs), virtual kernels, and jails. Such instances may look like real computers from the point of view of programs running in them. A computer program running on an ordinary operating system can see all resources of that computer. Programs running inside a container can only see the container's contents and devices assigned to the container.
OpenVZ is an operating-system-level virtualization technology for Linux. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, called containers, virtual private servers (VPSs), or virtual environments (VEs). OpenVZ is similar to Solaris Containers and LXC.
A live USB is a portable USB-attached external data storage device containing a full operating system that can be booted from. The term is reminiscent of USB flash drives but may encompass an external hard disk drive or solid-state drive, though they may be referred to as "live HDD" and "live SSD" respectively. They are the evolutionary next step after live CDs, but with the added benefit of writable storage, allowing customizations to the booted operating system. Live USBs can be used in embedded systems for system administration, data recovery, or test driving, and can persistently save settings and install software packages on the USB device.
A home server is a computing server located in a private computing residence providing services to other devices inside or outside the household through a home network or the Internet. Such services may include file and printer serving, media center serving, home automation control, web serving, web caching, file sharing and synchronization, video surveillance and digital video recorder, calendar and contact sharing and synchronization, account authentication, and backup services. In the recent times, it has become very common to run hundreds of applications as containers, isolated from the host operating system.
oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.
In computing, virtualization (v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers.
The TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is a free open-source software project which develops a range of Debian-based pre-packaged server software appliances. Turnkey appliances can be deployed as a virtual machine, in cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services or installed in physical computers.
Linux Containers (LXC) is an operating system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a control host using a single Linux kernel.
QVD is an open-source virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product built on Linux. Its main purpose is to provide remote desktops to users.
OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a free Linux distribution designed for network-attached storage (NAS). The project's lead developer is Volker Theile, who instituted it in 2009. OMV is based on the Debian operating system, and is licensed through the GNU General Public License v3.
SmartOS is a free and open-source SVR4 hypervisor based on the UNIX operating system that combines OpenSolaris technology with bhyve and KVM virtualization. Its core kernel contributes to the illumos project. It features several technologies: Crossbow, DTrace, bhyve, KVM, ZFS, and Zones. Unlike other illumos distributions, SmartOS employs NetBSD pkgsrc package management. SmartOS is designed to be particularly suitable for building clouds and generating appliances. It was originally developed for and by Joyent, who announced in April 2022 that they had sold their business supporting and developing of Triton Datacenter and SmartOS to MNX Solutions. It is open-source and free for anyone to use.
Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first released in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.
bhyve is a type-2 (hosted) hypervisor initially written for FreeBSD. It can also be used on a number of illumos based distributions including SmartOS, OpenIndiana, and OmniOS. A port of bhyve to macOS called xhyve is also available.
Enterprise Storage OS, also known as ESOS, is a Linux distribution that serves as a block-level storage server in a storage area network (SAN). ESOS is composed of open-source software projects that are required for a Linux distribution and several proprietary build and install time options. The SCST project is the core component of ESOS; it provides the back-end storage functionality.
Container Linux is a discontinued open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure for clustered deployments. One of its focuses was scalability. As an operating system, Container Linux provided only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers, together with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing.
