At its conference BrainShare 2008 Novell revealed an unexpected evolution for its virtualization strategy: besides including the Xen hypervisor onto the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the company also plans to release a stand-alone hypervisor.

Certainly based on Xen, this new platform will address several challenges: competing against VMware, Citrix and Virtual Iron which are offering their hypervisors through OEM agreements, replacing VMware ESX Server inside the just acquired PlateSpin Forge appliance, positioning the company as a more agnostic virtualization provider.

The company didn't provide details about which operating system will be loaded into the Xen dom0 virtual machine. Probably it will be a special version of SUSE Linux with minimal OS footprint.

Update: PlateSpin contacted virtualization.info and stated that has no current plans to replace VMware ESX Server with the upcoming Novell platform inside Forge.