back to article Citrix: Novell's only option for virtualization marriage

What is commercial Linux distributor Novell going to do about server and desktop virtualization? It's a good question, and one that the company's top brass has not really addressed. In July 2006, with the launch of SUSE Linux 10, Novell was the first commercial Linux vendor to ship a Xen hypervisor tuned for Linux. And it is …

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  1. Victor 2
    Thumb Up

    interesting...

    I though about something like this two days ago... and it also made some kind of sense to me

    both companies are depending a lot on microsoft and it's future... so it would not be strange for them to unite efforts somehow to try to remain relevant in the "cloud"y future

  2. Paul Greavy
    Linux

    KVM is the only credible way to go

    Xen does suffer from that tiny problem that it is not linux. They managed to keep it quite for a long time but now that there is an alternative I'd say the game is up.

    KVM is rapidly reaching the point where xen is no longer relevant on a linux distro. So Novell have to provide full support for it, otherwise users and customers will abandon (open)SUSE.

    RedHat, of course, have two strategies - developing KVM while simultaneously enhancing libvirt to work with all known hypervisors. And suse are starting to suffer, afaict, because they do not _seem_ to involved in the development of either. Which makes it an unnecessary hassle for anyone who wants to use the latest libvirt code on a suse distro.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hypervisors are free now, VMware needs to move on

    I don't think the plan is for Citrix to make money selling the Xen Hypervisor. Every day Intel, AMD, and others are working to put more of the software virtualization layers functionality into their hardware, as APIs and standards become more solid the hypervisor itself will become invisible in the same way that DOS memory managers and other OS plumbing did 15 years ago.

    When the PCI bus can be virtualized safely in hardware I expect the hypervisor software layer to vanish entirely.

    Citrix has done what Citrix always does, give some of their core technology to Microsoft for inclusion in their OS (was Terminal Services then, is now the core of XenServer upon which Hyper-Free relies). Citrix will then use this to seed the market for their pay-for management tools and enterprise functionality.

    HZK

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    The Novell Jigsaw Puzzle

    Not only does Novell need to propose to Citrix, but they need to get their own house in order too. Novell, needs a standalone hyper-v as a base platform for SUSE, OES and other future offerings. You'd think this would be part of Novell's latest data center vision. It's been nearly a year since Novell merged the BSM company (Managed Objects) into it's portfolio and nothing much has come of that yet.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    eDirectory

    But Xenserver only supports Active Directory, not eDirectory....they might want to address that.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Re: eDirectory

    Novell needs to address a few things, though why does a hypervisor need to directly support a directory? The hyper-v justs needs to do what it does best, virtualize. Directory services are just that, a service delivered on top of a platform.

    (Paris because maybe I'm missing a clue here?)

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