SWsoft Distributes Virtuozzo Virtualization with SLES 10 Linux

Published: March 20, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization software maker SWsoft, which sells the Virtuozzo virtual private server product for Linux and Windows and which sponsors the OpenVZ development project for Linux, announced last week that it has secured a bundling deal with commercial Linux distributor Novell.

Under that agreement, SWsoft will be able to take Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 operating system, which was announced last July with integrated support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor, and add its Virtuozzo product to that SLES 10 product. This software bundle, which will be available in the second quarter, will give customers another virtualization option when it comes to SLES 10, and will presumably allow SWsoft to boost its sales because the ease of deployment that comes through bundling has some value. It is important to not that Novell has not agreed to bundle Virtuozzo with its own distributions of SLES 10, which would have been a much bigger deal. That could, yet happen, of course, and there are good reasons for Novell to offer both the Xen and the Virtozzo hypervisors at the heart of SUSE Linux.

The Xen hypervisor provides a virtualized environment on which multiple operating systems can run, including various Linuxes, Windows, and eventually the Solaris variant of Unix coded for X64 platforms. Whole operating system instances run side by side, and are isolated from each other by the hypervisor. With Virtuozzo, a single instance of the operating system kernel and its file system runs (in this case, either Linux or Windows) and then Virtuozzo creates isolated application runtime environments that look, at least as far as applications are concerned, like whole Linux or Windows instances when they are just slices of it. The Xen approach requires each operating system to be maintained independently, but offers better isolation--if one operating system crashes, it doesn't take the others out. The Virtuozzo approach, which is similar to BSD jails and Solaris containers, means only one operating system has to be maintained, but if that OS crashes, it takes down all of the virtualized boxes running above it.

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