The mystery company which still bids to buy Novell might actually be the Microsoft executives-dominated VMware

A friend recently asked me if I really wanted VMware, a company with a former Microsoft guy in charge, VMware, to buy Novell? His unspoken message was "Wouldn't that be horrible for Novell's Linux?"

Xen made a big splash when it was introduced, and VMWare has long dominated the virtualization space. But Red Hat's KVM promises to leave Xen in the dust, and challenge VMWare. At least that's what Red Hat says will happen.

Despite faltering financial results, Novell pushes on with partnerships such as that with VMware for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware.

Novell sidles with Microsoft's end of the spectrum and Gartner promotes Hyper-V by comparing VMware to Novell

Novell Inc. has added support for VMware Inc.'s Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2, which Novell says will make SUSE run faster on VMware's ESX hypervisor.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell announced at the VMworld 2007 trade show last week in San Francisco that it was working with VMware to make SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 work better with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor for X64 servers.

Microsoft 'mouthpieces' badmouth VMware and play up Novell's new relationship with Hyper-V

Sources say VMware is mulling a partnership, investment or outright acquisition of Alfresco — the open source enterprise content management system. The potential reason: Alfresco would potentially allow VMware to attack Microsoft SharePoint, which generates more than $1 billion in annual revenues for Microsoft. Here are the details.