The Nitix Virtual Server (NVS) is a way to load a fully-featured Linux environment on top of Nitix, which is a greatly stripped down Linux core designed to run as an appliance. Before NVS, it was very hard to load applications onto Nitix; with NVS, it became easy.

When Nitix was renamed to IBM Lotus Foundations, the NVS product was renamed to IBM Lotus Foundations Start.

Versabox is an open source project designed to work like NVS, but support more applications and be more up-to-date.