Arca Noae considers one physical computer (workstation, server, tablet, or handheld) or active virtual machine a single system or licensing unit. Thus, you may create a dozen virtual machines, but if you only use one at a time, then like a book, only one copy is in use at any given time.
Physical machines are a little easier to define. We don’t care how many physical processors or how many processing cores are in the machine. A computer of any type, with a single systemboard, powered by a single connected power button, counts as a single system or licensing unit.
A single licensing unit may not be shared between a single physical workstation and any virtual machines, active or not. Thus, if you have one physical computer running an OS/2-based operating system and another computer serving as a host to even one virtual machine running an OS/2-based operating system, we consider you to have two systems.
Blue Lion is the codename for Arca Noae’s upcoming release of our OS/2-based operating system, ArcaOS 5.0. Blue Lion is based on the last version of OS/2 Warp 4 (Warp 4.52, Merlin Convenience Package 2, or MCP2) released by IBM.
On top of this, Arca Noae adds symmetrical multiprocessing support (SMP), an updated and enhanced kernel, our suite of updated drivers and software which is available in our subscription service, various fixes and enhancements to the operating system, a Samba 4 networking client, Kerberos authentication capability, our SNAP accelerated video driver, new user apps, and much more.
Blue Lion will allow personal users, small businesses, and small, medium and large enterprises to retain the OS/2 infrastructure they already have, while replacing their older hardware with current machines. In addition, Blue Lion will also be quite at home running in a virtual machine under a variety of hypervisors, for those environments where virtualization is either a better fit than bare metal or where OS/2 has already been virtualized.