Novell's chief technology officer, Markus Rex, has hit back at criticism that the company included an unstable Xen virtualisation environment in its new Linux server, pointing to support from hardware partners.

At Novell's Sydney, Australia, office on Thursday, Rex responded to claims by Linux competitor Red Hat that Xen was not stable enough to be deployed in enterprise environments. Novell has claimed to be the first vendor to include Xen in its Linux distribution, Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource, enables users to run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware.

"If you look at the Xen open source project, we have been the number-two contributor during the past 10 months or so to that project. So we've kind of contributed most of the enterprise readiness for the Xen platform," Rex said.

Red Hat only had to look at Novell's launch of its new server for testimony that Xen was enterprise-ready, Rex added.

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