Novell, Virtual Iron Embed VFe-Capable Kernel into SLES 9

Published: February 7, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are taking on Red Hat in the commercial Linux marketplace, as Novell is doing, you have to work harder, partner more broadly, and get a wider variety of useful technologies into your Linux distribution. This is one reason why Novell was quick to grab the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor and embed it into its SUSE desktop distribution and weave it into the future SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. This is also the reason why Novell has partnered with Virtual Iron to bring a special version of SLES 9 to market support Virtual Iron's brand of virtualization.

While many server virtualization hypervisors allow you to carve up one or more processors into many virtual or logical machines (and in a number of different ways), Virtual Iron's VFe software suite can carve up a single server and also glue together as many as 16 processor cores spread across as many distinct physical servers into a giant virtualized server. The partitions in a Virtual Iron configuration can span from as small as one-sixteenth of a processor core up to one virtual machine partition that spans 16 processor cores; the combined maximum number of virtual machines that the VFe hypervisor can manage is 128 partitions in the current VFe 2.0 release, which was announced in October 2005. The Virtual Iron VFe software doesn't just virtualize processor partitions, but has built-in SAN and network virtualization technologies, too. For a true virtualized infrastructure, you need to virtualize processor, memory, and I/O, which is why VFe does all three. Last August, Virtual Iron announced that its VFe software will eventually manage partitions created by the Xeon hypervisor, and it stands to reason that VFe will eventually manage VMware GSX Server (just replaced yesterday with a new product called VMware Server, which is a free product) and ESX Server partitions, as well. With VFe 2.0, Virtual Iron supported Opteron processors from AMD; it already supported Intel's Xeon processors in the 1.0 release from a year ago. Intel lead Virtual Iron's third round of venture funding, and gave Virtual Iron access to the "Virtualization Technology" electronics coming in future server Xeon and Itanium chips due this year.

While VFe has been supported on both Red Hat and Novell distributions, Virtual Iron's approach to server virtualization requires that changes be made to the Linux kernel so it can dice and slice and glue servers with VFe. This can be a barrier to adoption, which is why Novell and Red Hat are working with the Xen hypervisor community to not only help it work better with Linux, but to get it embedded in their Linux distributions. Because VFe is a radically different approach to virtualization, it requires a different set of kernel modifications, and now Novell has stepped up to the plate and with Service Pack 3 of its SLES 9 program, it is distributing a preconfigured Linux 2.6 kernel that is ready to rock with VFe. If you want to run VFe, you just pick that kernel and install as you normally would, and then VFe knows how to grab ahold of the Linux machine once you are done setting it up. According to Justin Steinman, manager of worldwide data center products at Novell, the kernel extensions required by VFe give it optimized performance for clustered databases and to support features unique to VFe, such as hot plug memory and CPUs.

This native Linux kernel support puts VFe a few months ahead of Xen, which is not set to be put into the Linux kernel by Novell until SLES 10 ships in May or so. And the support also puts Novell ahead of Red Hat. But how long that will last remains to be seen. Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, says that he is in "deep discussions" with Red Hat and has VFe software running in Red Hat's labs. For many customers, then, it will probably become a question of who offers better support for a wide variety of virtualization technologies--support meaning having it integrated and having installation and tech support services to help customers out when things go wrong. While Red Hat may be the dominant shipper of commercial Linux licenses, it can be easily argued that Novell has a much deeper history with partnering and technical support. And here's the good bit as far as software vendors are concerned: Because Novell has certified the Virtual Iron software running on its SLES 9 SP3 software, it can support application software certified for SLES 9 without affecting existing ISV certifications.

And, there are other hypervisors to add and other partners to get on board with this technology, too, which leaves Novell some room for differentiation. For instance, it would not be surprising to see Novell and VMware ink an agreement that allows Novell to distribute the new freebie VMware Server, which is a rebranded, beefed up, shareware version of the GSX Server hypervisor. The intricacies of the GNU General Public License are a bit tricky, but if such closed-source, freeware cannot be distributed right in the SUSE CDs, Novell might be able to offer it as a download through the VMware site through its Yast Online Update services, which are currently how you get unsupported fonts and drivers for various PCs. Then Yast could go about configuring the VMware Server.

IBM has been an early partner of both Novell's SUSE business for the past three years and it has also lent its weight and name to Virtual Iron's efforts, particularly on its BladeCenter blade servers. If any machine is ripe for the kind of cutting and pasting that VFe is capable of, it is a blade server, which you sometimes want to act like a bunch of little machines and at other times to act like a single machine--albeit only virtually so.