Quoting from the Novell official announcement:
Novell today 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 virtualization 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.
… the VMI code is available today to customers who participate in Novell’s beta program…
Novell currently is the most active enterprise distribution provider in virtualization industry. Besides this integration the company it’s also a major contributor of open source hypervisor Xen, which includes in its SUSE Enterprise Linux as well, and it has a long term partnership with Microsoft to grant interoperability with upcoming codename Viridian.