Novell and VMware Work to Improve SLES 10 Virtualization

Published: June 17, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like housework, virtualization work is never done. Commercial Linux distributor Novell said this week that it is working with server virtualization juggernaut VMware to move the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) down into the Linux kernel used by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The kernel modifications were actually done as patches to the Service Pack 2 update of SLES 10, which was announced several weeks ago. The VMI approach provides a communication link between guest operating systems running inside the ESX Server hypervisor and that hypervisor, which allows for more streamlined operations of guest operating systems, and specifically helps SLES 10 guests to run with lower overhead than was possible before the VMI patches were added to the Linux distribution. Ubuntu also supports the VMI patches at this point.

VMI was a proposed standard put forth by VMware in 2005 as a means of presenting paravirtualized guests to their hypervisors, with the idea that a single binary version of an operating system would be able to run on raw iron or VMI-compliant hypervisors. So far, it has not become the standard that VMware had hoped, but that is because the Xen hypervisor project, run by Citrix Systems these days, and Hyper-V, a Xen-alike hypervisor created by Microsoft Windows Server 2008, have their own ways of doing things. You can count on lots of proposed standards, with server virtualization being so young on the X64 platform still, who knows how this will all shake out. Still, the addition of VMI for SLES 10 guests can't hurt for those shops that are opting for ESX Server for their hypervisor instead of Xen--and that is still a lot of shops right now, with VMware still being the volume and revenue leader in server virtualization as far as anyone can tell.

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