Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Novell to do virtual Red Hat

September 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Novell to do virtual Red Hat

TAGS: Virtualization

Just blogging from the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum, where Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe said that Novell will support virtualized instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) running on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) on systems that use Xen and Intel's Virtualization Technology.

According to Novell's statement, the company will offer support for virtualized RHEL 4 on SLES 10 "up through and including Level 3 (or core engineering) support. That means Novell will provide technical support for the Xen hypervisor if a customer uncovers an issue running a virtual instance of Red Hat Linux and that issue is not reproducible in a native, or non-virtualized, environment."

In case you missed the underlying competitve play here, Novell makes it clear, noting that the program will "allow Red Hat customers to migrate to Novell service and support while still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtualized environment."

Integrated XEN 3.0 support was one of the key innovations in SLES 10, allowing companies to host virtual servers via XEN.

And Novell isn't stopping with SLES 10. According to Jaffe, developers are working on a fully virtualized version of Netware for SLES 10, due out next year.

Posted by Paul Roberts on September 25, 2006 12:46 PM

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