Johannesburg, 14 Sep 2007
Novell has announced significant enhancements in the performance of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server when the Linux* operating system is running as a virtual machine guest in a VMware* environment.
To deliver this improved performance, Novell modified the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel to support the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a communication mechanism between the guest operating system and hypervisor that simplifies the task of virtualisation and makes Linux a more efficient guest operating system when running in VMware environments.
The VMI modifications, along with the paravirt-ops interface, have been accepted by the upstream Linux development community and will be included in upcoming releases of the standard Linux kernel, as well as future versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.
"As the first enterprise Linux vendor to provide these enhancements for the VMware VMI, Novell continues to demonstrate our commitment to providing enterprise Linux customers benefits through virtualisation and other innovative technologies," said Holger Dyroff, vice-president of product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise at Novell. "Virtualisation is proving its value in the data centre, and our collaboration with VMware is part of our multi-pronged virtualisation strategy to create additional opportunities for customers to reduce costs and increase efficiency with Linux virtualisation."
Dan Chu, VMware vice-president of emerging products and markets, said: "We are pleased that Novell is delivering enhanced performance for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in VMware virtualised environments. The inclusion of VMware VMI patches into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is designed to provide customers with increased performance, improved behaviour of timing-critical workloads and better interoperability by allowing the same VMI-enabled SUSE Linux Enterprise Server kernel to run on physical machines and on VMware Infrastructure. We look forward to working with Novell on future initiatives to make SUSE Linux Enterprise run even better on VMware Infrastructure."
Novell is publicly previewing the enhancements this week at VMworld 2007, and the VMI code is available today to customers who participate in Novell's beta program. For more information on SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings from Novell, visit www.novell.com/linux.
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