There's been some thoughts thrown around about what distro to use. Since this is something that we have a great deal of experience and expertise in, I thought I would come up with a plan and share it with the group prior to the meeting.

I believe we should put together our own distro that everyone uses, including the dom0.  Just as we have done here in the Onstor group, I believe the best choice is to base it on Debian.  My reasons for this are, in part:

●	The number 1 choice for embedded systems like ours.
●	Best technical choice: most integration testing; best for security and functionality updates; easiest to customize....
●	Most experience: we've been doing this for our product for two years now, and have extensive experience doing this exact thing.  Not to mention that this is my area of expertise.
●	Best community support: there's a reason why more distros are based on Debian (Ubuntu, skolinux, etc.) than any other.
●	Undeniably “free”

A single distro that we all use is the best choice, for maintenance, reusability and human as well as digital resource utilization reasons.  The idea that we contract with Citrix for the dom0 environment has been brought up, but I've reached the conclusion that is not a necessary way to go.  For one thing, their only real value add is in the generic server area, which isn't us.  Their support for the kernel is based on community support, which we're fully able to utilize ourselves.  We can still hire them for consulting if we have the need.  Meanwhile, we've recently hired a senior developer with real experience and knowledge in the virtualization world (a former VMWare employee) especially as it relates to the storage stack, so I think we're fairly well covered there.

The tools and processes for putting out a distro we already have in place, so there's virtually no ramp up time that can be saved by going another route.  Our process is optimized for modifications, so nothing more than a quick email is required to add a package to the mix, and many examples of customizations and additions are already in our tree to help developers get a jumpstart on any similar extentions.

Kernel

We will need to build two kernels at least, one for dom0 and a client kernel.  I'm thinking that we will want to put this together ourselves, since distro kernels are targeted towards the widest possible hardware support, whereas we will want to craft ours to specifically handle just our hardware and required services.  The possible exception to that is the Xen kernel, which the Debian maintainers put a lot of work into getting just right, so it is quite possible the what makes the most sense there is to, at the very least, leverage that for our purposes.  That will be something we can look at down the road.