Novell Developing Stand-Alone Xen-Based Hypervisor Product - The Promise of Plug-and-Go Virtualization (
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Demand for the stand-alone hypervisor product would depend on what the
user's application needs were, Jaffe said, noting that the current approach of
integrating the hypervisor as part of Linux worked fine for the conventional
compute model, where there was a big system and a stack, and would continue to
work fine there.
"But then, if you have something like the all-in-one appliance-like
framework or any of the other different emerging models of computing, for that
you sometimes want a tighter form factor that you can just plug it in and go.
So we are trying to address these different market segments," Jaffe said.
Click here to read about how VMware is looking beyond the
hypervisor.
While Novell believes that the target market for virtualization is
"everyone," the appropriate form factor would differ based on whether
the user was running a conventional stack, a tight appliance or a turnkey
appliance that did not require all of the overhead and configurability, he
said.
Asked to what extent or how Novell plans to make SLES 11, the next version
of its server operating system, more roles-based, as Microsoft has done with Windows Server 2008, Jaffe said the way he looked at this
was that there was the core operating system and the management system.
In the Linux world, and probably in the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 time frame,
the operating system itself would manage more core system resources and be less
of an application manager, while the broader management system would be
providing the other capabilities, he said.
"Do I agree with Microsoft that roles-based
management is an important paradigm? Absolutely. But from a function
placement perspective, I would put it more in the management system rather than
in the operating system. With Microsoft's monolithic integrated approach, you
sometimes can't cull that out separately," he said.
Infrastructure 
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