Virtualization as a Founding Technology for the Grid Infrastructure of the A&A VRC

Grid computing and Virtualization offers various advantages that make them attractive for technical computing tasks. Moreover they offers new possibilities to the scientific research both in term of resource provisioning, resource sharing, and scientific software distribution and maintainance. An improved e-Infrastructure can be provided to European Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) researchers by combining Grid and Virtualization technologies to offer an efficient, stable and reliable set of core Grid services specialized for A&A Virtual Research Community.