virtualization.info Editors

Under the terms of the deal, corporate users buying any BladeCenter server get evaluation copies of VMware’s suite that are good for six months. At the end of that period, users can decide whether to buy or not to buy the suite, which includes VMware ESX Server, VMware Virtual SMP, and VMware VirtualCenter with VMotion.

“What we found is that people who use it [VMware’s suite of virtual products], appear to have a propensity to deploy it. This is something that IBM and VMWare are doing jointly because we have found that in working with IBM over the past four years, there is a high degree of synergy between blade server users and virtualization users,” said Brian Byun, VMware’s vice president of alliances.

Users will have the right to deploy the evaluation products on as many as two blade servers, according to Byun.

The combination of BladeCenter servers running VMware’s products is intended to allow corporate users to virtualize server platforms on which to deploy their mission critical applications and Web-based services, thereby lowering cost of ownership through reducing the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure, according to spokespeople for both companies.

On IBM’s Intel-based servers, VMware already provides the partitioning technology for IBM’s Virtualization Engine technology, which makes consolidating workloads from existing higher-end servers onto less expensive servers easier, company officials claim.

IBM officials believe the real value of the deal to users will be that VMware’s products will work well with the management software they already include with each blade server, namely the IBM Director.

“Last year we introduced a component (part of IBM Director) called the Virtual Machine Manager that works with VMware’s VMotion and Microsoft’s (Profile, Products, Articles) virtual manager. But VMware’s (product) is interesting because it has a traditional partitioning scheme to cut up a processor into multiple machines, but also gives you a management scheme for scale-out applications, making them easier to manage as you add more blades,” said Tim Dougherty, director of IBM’s eServer BladeCenter products. “We have architected things so that all this is manageable from a single piece of glass,” he said.

Dougherty believes that the management scheme will prove to be the capability that convinces many users to deepen their commitment to a range of different virtualization strategies over time.

One user appeared to agree with Dougherty on the value of improved management capabilities for virtual infrastructure software.

“It [VMware’s virtual infrastructure] makes a server environment more manageable as well as redundant. It can also boost efficiency because blades take up half the space of more traditional 1U servers,” said Carlo Bonura, a technical system analyst for Dean Health System, a provider of integrated medical services, insurance, and research.

primarily a rollup of fixes we have seen since the product was released to improve performance and increase scalability.
In addition, with Service Pack 1:

– Virtual Server 2005 will have host support for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 x64 Edition (note that this does not include IA64)
– provide PXE support
– qualify Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003 SP1as a host and as a guest
– include the Virtual Disk Precompactor, a utility that is designed to “zero out” — that is, overwrite with zeros — any available blank space on a virtual hard disk

The support for multiple instances of the operating system in SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 comes through software called Xen, an open-source package that competes with products from Microsoft and EMC’s VMware and has won big-name endorsements. Novell is adding the technology, which is useful for a number of tasks, to give programmers new abilities, said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for SuSE Linux.

Xen provides a foundation called a virtual machine that an operating system thinks is a real computer. Running an operating system on such a foundation provides developers a painless way to test new software without risking damage to a primary computer. For example, they don’t have to worry that a crash will corrupt essential system files.

However, Xen is still in fairly raw form. The software will be included with the Linux version but isn’t installed by default, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

Novell announced the new Linux version at the CeBit trade show in Germany on Thursday. The cost in Europe–where SuSE Linux sales are strongest–will be 74 euros ($99), but U.S. pricing won’t be set until closer to the product launch date, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

SuSE Linux Professional is geared for desktop computer tasks such as word processing, programming or playing digital videos. Novell hopes Windows users wanting to breathe new life into older computers will be interested.

Novell will offer a “Live DVD” version that can be run directly off a DVD drive to let people experiment with but not install the software. And about eight weeks after release, an installable version will be available for free download, Mancusi-Ungaro said.

SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 also adds the Linphone software for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); the Firefox Web browser; and the F-Spot photo organizer software. And it comes with the latest versions of graphical interface software, GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4.

The Professional product line changes more quickly and includes newer features than the company’s premium product, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Xen is “hypervisor” software that runs directly on a computer’s hardware, managing operating system access to memory, input-output subsystem and other resources. So far, Xen only can run modified versions of Linux on x86 processors such as Intel’s Pentium, but work is under way to extend it to other operating systems and processor domains.

Sebastian Biallas, PearPC’s main developers, spoke briefly and exclusively to Neowin on the release – and it looks like the group is still shaping up for its response. “There are some people who have copyright on (parts of) PearPC, and it depends on how the react on this,” he said. “The basic rule is: You either must release PearPC derivates under GPL or you must obtain a licence for other use.” Aside from that, he couldn’t comment further on it – but it looks likely there will be more movement on this from the PearPC side over the coming weeks.