Novell wants ISVs to create appliances that marry their applications to the SUSE and to underpin the idea has trotted out a beta of SLES JeOS, a “Just enough Operating System,” so it’ll all make sense.

Red Hat also has an Appliance Operating System in the works and says it expects the project to go into beta mid-year.

Novell’s JeOS is supposed to simplify application deployment and support and of course reduce development costs. It’s also supposed to be smaller, more secure and higher-performing than an application running on a full general-purpose operating system.

Novell imagines such widgetry being bundled as a software appliance or as a virtual appliance with a paravirtualized kernel designed to run in a virtual environment.

Naturally it’s got a program to supervise the initiative. It’s called the SUSE Appliance Program and virtual appliances built under its aegis can run on Xen or VMware ESX or Microsoft’s Hyper-V as both a paravirtualized and fully virtualized guest.

IDC estimates the appliance market will be worth nearly $700 million in 2011.

Novell is promising automated tools in the next few months.

JeOS, which is customized to be just enough widgetry to support a given application, is built from the same code base as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE-certified applications will be automatically certified for JeOS.

There is an existing community-driven project called LimeJeOS that’s building a minimized version of openSUSE that Novell now intends to participate in.

For early adopters there are several virtual image formats available: VMware VMDK, Xen and a raw hard disk image. Hyper-V will be available once it gets here.

See www.novell.com/linux/appliance.