Free Software Linux

In many organizations, the first round of virtualization choice has been made.  But as the technology progresses and improves with time (and what a difference 12 months makes), viable alternatives to that initial choice begin to become more apparent. Should you stay the course or make a change?  Hedge your bets and choose two? I won’t debate that here, but just know there are choices…

VMware has the marketshare and name recognition…  Xen has the performance and power of freedom… Hyper-V is for the Microsoft faithful…  What’s your cup of virtualization-tea??

Although SUSE Linux Enterprise Server includes Xen virtualization (recently upgraded to Xen 3.2, btw), and Novell offers special virtual machine drivers to help customers get outstanding Windows Server guest OS performance… we really DO PLAY NICE with everyone in the sandbox.  Here’s a quick overview:

For VMware customers, we have been partners of theirs for many years, and in addition to supporting NetWare and SLES on VMware, we recently released an optimized version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware to give the best performing Linux on VMware. Support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) has been incorporated into the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel in SLE 10 SP2. Simply put, this makes SLES perform better (a more efficient guest OS) when running on VMI-compliant hypervisors.  Wanna maximize performance of your guest OS’s on VMware? SLES is the answer.  Check out this VMware whitepaper on VMI performance too.

For Hyper-V customers…  (oh, wait — there aren’t any yet…  ;-)  But when Hyper-V does make its way to market, there is one distribution of Linux which is optimized for performance and will be “enlightened” — SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.  Again, if you want the best Linux performance on Hyper-V, SLES is the answer.

Finally, for Xen customers…  the arrival of SLE Service Pack 2 brought several enhancements and features to the table. First of all, Xen on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the first and only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 guests, and the live migration of those guests across physical machines.  Xen was upgraded to version 3.2 and virtualization management tool upgrades. Also, let’s not forget the Virtual Machine Driver Pack which gives a “near-native” boost to the performance of guest OS’s on Xen/SLES, such as Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

…and did I mention that Novell also offers a cross-hypervisor management tool:  ZENworks Orchestrator
and an integrated suite of products to help with every facet of server consolidation and disaster recovery with virtual machines:  PlateSpin

My suggestion… go ahead and make a choice, but keep your eyes open or you might miss the goal.

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