According to eWEEK, Novell is also busy creating a stand alone hypervisor to enter the XenServer, Hyper-V and ESX(i) battle. It will be Xen based and in my opinion a smart move considering they bought Platespin and already have a management tool called Orchestrator. It’s a shame they are a few years late, they should have bought Xenserver when they had the chance… or even Virtual Iron. Anyway we will just have to wait and see,
Novell Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe hinted at a stand-alone hypervisor product during his keynote address at the BrainShare conference in March, saying one of Novell’s goals was to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that would be supported by a new tool set designed to quickly build specialized images.
This has even been diplayed at Brainshare. Novell is allready running Xen Hypervisor in their SUSE linux products but they showed a USB key running Xen Hypervisor product running a enlightend Windows Server 2008 live migrating it to a new server.
Well a USB key running isn’t necessarily a standalone hypervisor like ESX3i, it could be a slimmed down linux with xen. Nevertheless they made me curious….
It indeed uses paravirtualization technology. Compare it with the embeded Citrix XenServer solutions. But then indeed a very slimmed down OS with the hypervisor piece is running on.