June 18, 2007
Novell offers Linux service pack
Quad-core processors, Active Directory improvements featured; virtual machine drivers also readied
Recommend ThisLooking to bolster Linux in enterprise environments, Novell is offering its first service pack for Suse Linux Enterprise 10, with capabilities for new quad-core processors. The company also announced Monday commercial availability plans for Suse Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack.
Service Pack 1 supports quad-core processors in the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron product lines. Also featured are improvements in interoperability and system management, Novell said.
"What we further improved was the interoperability with Active Directory for both the server and the desktop," said Holger Dyroff, Novell vice president of Suse Linux Enterprise product management.
High-availability storage infrastructure has been updated in the service pack and the platform's audit subsystem has been enriched, Novell said. The storage infrastructure features new versions of the open source Heartbeat high availability software and Oracle Cluster File System. The audit subsystem, which tracks transactions, now is complete.
Support for Novell Open Enterprise Server 2, which merges NetWare and Linux, also is featured.
Other improvements noted by Novell include:
* Expanded OpenOffice.org support, with capabilities for Microsoft Office macros
* An updated desktop user experience
* A preview of desktop virtualization technology based on the Xen hypervisor
* Advances in enterprise integration
* Improved security
Novell also detailed Suse Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack. This package includes drivers to enable unmodified Windows and Linux guest operating systems to run with near-native performance in virtual environments created with Xen in Suse Linux.
Featured are paravirtualization and enterprise-level support for a range of fully virtualized workloads. Customers can run legacy applications on newer hardware. Paravirtualization bolsters communication with the hypervisor when a guest operating system is running on top of a host OS, thus improving performance.
Featured in Virtual Machine Driver Pack are drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows 2003. Virtual Machine Driver Pack is due for general availability in July. Drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 will be released later this summer.
A one-year subscription to Driver Pack costs $299 per physical server for as many as four virtual machines, or $699 per physical server for an unlimited number of virtual machines.
Xen drivers for Suse Linux Enterprise Server are available now as part of Suse Linux Enterprise distribution.
Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld.
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