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Posted in Kernel, Microsoft, SLES/SLED, Standard, Virtualisation, Windows, Xen at 1:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
There’s GNU/Linux and then there’s Novell’s own ‘special’ Linux
Whatever the future of computing has in store, it becomes abundantly clear that virtualisation is an integral part of it, particularly on the server side. Microsoft and Novell have been preparing for this by building an alliance that quite systematically excludes all their rivals, including Novell's Linux 'siblings'. Remember: “Novell and Microsoft” typically come before “Novell and GNU/Linux”.
=> an alliance | excludes | Novell's Linux 'siblings'
In a new article from ZDNet Asia, Novell sheds some light on virtualisation, characterising it as the way forward.
Developments in virtualization technology are helping to assuage fear and uncertainty around the implementation of such projects, so users have less to risk now, says a Novell executive.
You are reminded that Xen is, in some ways, a captive of Microsoft as of late. The following new article from Microsoft’s pet press reminds us again how Novell leaves its siblings out in the cold.
=> a captive of Microsoft | ↺ new article from Microsoft’s pet press
Currently, SuSE Linux Enterprise is the only Xen hypervisor on which Microsoft will provide full support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 running as a virtual guest.
We wrote about this very recently. Now comes some similar news about VMWare. Here is the opening paragraph from the press release:
=> very recently | ↺ the press release
Novell(R) announced today it is collaborating with VMware to improve Linux performance in VMware environments by incorporating support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) into the SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise kernel. Demonstrating their commitment to provide open interoperability and optimization for virtualized environments, the companies have worked together to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for the VMware platform.
What is “SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise kernel”?
Some articles were later published to explain this in human-readable and hype-free terms. Here it is the first such article.
Waltham, Mass.-based 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.
Here is another article.
Novell Monday released updates to its Suse Linux kernel designed to make the operating system more efficient when running on top of VMware environments.
The upgrade to the Suse Linux Enterprise kernel lets it take advantage of paravirtualization techniques so it runs more efficiently as a guest operating system. Specifically, Novell has built in support for VMware’s Virtual Machine Interface (VMI).”The patch to the kernel provides increased performance and better interoperability,” says Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for open platform solutions at Novell.
What is this “Suse Linux kernel”? What ever happen to upstreaming?
This conundrum is further complicated by the following new report. Citrix (Xen) and Microsoft are working against standards again (or an attempt to establish some consistency). They are working against VMWare.
VMI was a proposed standard put forth by VMware in 2005 as a means of presenting paravirtualized guests to their hypervisors, with the idea that a single binary version of an operating system would be able to run on raw iron or VMI-compliant hypervisors. So far, it has not become the standard that VMware had hoped, but that is because the Xen hypervisor project, run by Citrix Systems these days, and Hyper-V, a Xen-alike hypervisor created by Microsoft Windows Server 2008, have their own ways of doing things.
You can hopefully see what is happening here. For further analysis see [1, 2]. █
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