Novell and Citrix collaborate on virtualization
Their agreement increases virtualization interoperability and continues Novell's quest of certifying Suse Linux Enterprise Server as a 'Perfect Guest' OS
Follow @infoworldNovell and Citrix Systems have announced a partnership agreement to help push virtualization interoperability forward for channel partners and cloud computing service providers.
Through the new partnership, Novell has certified Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as a guest operating system platform for use within Citrix XenServer -- and along with that, both companies will be able to provide joint technical support to customers running within this configuration. As a result of this agreement, more than 4,500 enterprise applications that are already certified as Novell Ready for SLES will also now be certified as Citrix Ready community-verified when running in an SLES guest virtual machine on Citrix XenServer.
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The agreement also allows Citrix to participate in the PlateSpin Recon for Assessment Program. This gives Citrix services and Citrix channel partners the ability to offer customers virtualization, server consolidation, and cloud readiness assessments using Novell's toolset acquired from PlateSpin. The PlateSpin Recon tool provides consolidation planning and capacity management and gives customers a view of their physical and virtual infrastructure. Providing this type of information is needed in order to accelerate the move to virtualization.
This new partnership agreement rasies a host of questions for Novell's virtualization approach. Which way does the virtual wind blow for Novell -- is the company's focus on Xen? And if so, what does that mean for KVM? After all, we recently heard about Novell participating in a new open source KVM project, AlacrityVM. And didn't Novell also announce a preview of KVM support in SLES 11? Where does Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere fit into all of this?
