At the beginning of March, Citrix and Novell started a new partnership on virtualisation.
Both offer commercial grade hypervisors based on Xen, but Novell is extending its interest to KVM, following the rival Red Hat.
Despite the evident competition to win Linux shops, Novell agreed to provide joint technical support for customers running SLES on XenServer, and Citrix agreed to use PlateSpin Recon internally and across its Solutions Advisors partner network.
The deal works for Citrix which lacks capacity planning tools as part of its virtual infrastructure and may be not ready to acquire a startup in this space.
It works less well for Novell, which is certainly interested in pushing the PlateSpin business, but continues to give confusing messages about its hypervisor strategy.
If the effort generates a concrete interest, it may help Citrix to reconsider an acquisition, and the company may go for something more VDI and application oriented, like Lanamark or Liquidware Labs solutions.
Naturally, as dataplex have been a Novell/Platespin partner for 5 years we are pretty confident in the tool set and its ability to to define a virtual architecture with very granular detail. Need help on your scoping exercise? Please contact us to find out how, 0845 260 5757.
Thanks to our friends over at Virtualization.info for the heads up on this.