In mid-March Novell revealed the plan to launch a new platform just for virtualization purposes.
Its SUSE Enterprise Linux already includes Xen so that customers can use it as the company hypervisor as needed. But that’s probably not enough for Novell.
Now Jeff Jaffe, the company’s CTO, provides (here and here) few additional details about this new platform and the overall strategy:
…Linux is at the core of our virtualization vision. A p-Distro or thin Linux is just enough operating system to get the hardware running and to host virtual machines. Then we put the identity-enabled virtual machines, or v-Distros, on top of the p-Distros. The result? Workloads can be dynamically moved to run on any policy controlled hardware…
…Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers…
It seems that the only difference between the current SUSE Enterprise Linux with Xen and the upcoming Linux distribution for Xen (called p-Distro above) is in the OS footprint.