Xen appears to be the most common virtualization software used by grid developers and researchers at present but we should not limit our scope to exclude other virtualization technologies although we expect that Xen will dominate this workshop.
Many sites have independently developed virtualization management tools which should be compared and assessed, some may overlap but many will undoubtedly for fill different niches. Establishing a clear picture of all current usage scenarios will be a goal of this workshop.
Many groups have put virtualization to different uses. Virtualization for testing purposes is becoming more well known, but a growing number of virtual grid service nodes are being deployed in production.
Consolidating services, and using virtualization to make better use of hardware is a reoccurring thread of interest. Many people also propose that virtual domains could be use the Unix / Linux API as a common platform upon which to support grid jobs.
This workshop will hopefully bring together the Grid communities virtualization experiments so we can all proceed quicker on any potential gains to be made from virtualization.