The Novell increased focus on KVM didn’t pass unnoticed.
Several news outlets suggested that this may the first step before Novell abandons Xen, following the Red Hat path, which will ultimately turn into the end of Xen as a community-driven open source hypervisor.
The whole idea is not useful to Citrix, which wants as many partners as possible on its side to validate Xen, and certainly it’s not useful to Novell, which needs to avoid that customers start looking elsewhere (read VMware, Citrix, Oracle).
So while Citrix helped to explain why KVM makes sense in some cases but it’s not a full Xen replacement, Novell somehow clarified its intention to support both virtualization platforms.
Nonetheless, the buzz around AlacrityVM must have pleased the company which felt the urgency to (informally) announce the upcoming full support to KVM in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, to be released later this year.
If the market is really interested in KVM, Novell may leverage the opportunity more than others: the acquisition of PlateSpin gave the company some of the best P2V/V2V migration tools on the market, which will be an easy sell anywhere enterprises want to switch from Xen to KVM.