Novell Offers Tech Support for Virtualized Red Hat Linux--Sort Of

Published: September 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the commercial Linux distribution racket, the only way to make money is to charge for installation and technical support and other services, such as systems integration or custom modifications. The restrictions imposed by the GNU General Public License, which governs the Linux kernel and a lot of the code inside a Linux distribution, mean that companies cannot try to charge money for the strings of 1s and 0s that make up an operating system.

In a purely economic sense, those 1s and 0s are worthless.

For years, Novell has been competing with Red Hat and other Linux distributors on the technical merits of its SUSE Linux operating system compared to other products--as well as competing against Microsoft's Windows and various Unix implementations. This has yielded a certain amount of success, but in many cases, an application that has been certified for RHEL 3 or RHEL 4 is not available on SUSE Linux 8, 9, or 10, and there is no way for Novell to get any money from the companies that want to deploy that application.

Enter virtualization, stage right, to shake the apple cart--but not quite tip it.

This week, at the Virtualization Executive Forum in New York, Novell said that it would offer technical support on RHEL 4 when it ran within Xen hypervisor virtual machine partitions as implemented by its SLES 10 distro. Specifically, Novell will offer Level 1, 2, and 3 tech support on RHEL 4 running on Xen partitions where the issue is related to the Xen hypervisor and is not repeatable on a standalone RHEL 4 Linux instance. To get such support, you have to be using an Intel processor equipped with the VT hardware-assisted virtualization features (Core, Xeon 3000 and 5100, and Itanium 9000 chips support VT in servers and desktops).

Novell says that it will begin a pilot program for this virtualized Red Hat support in October among a select few large enterprises, and will announce general availability of the support by the end of the year.

What Novell really announced this week is that it would isolate issues with RHEL 4 as they relate to the Xen hypervisor. So, this is really Xen support more than it is Red Hat support, and furthermore, it is not clear if the burden is on the customer to prove that an issue does not affect a standalone RHEL 4 implementation. (Once customers virtualize, they won't want to build a physical RHEL 4 setup to test the idea, after all.)

It might be tempting for Novell to go all the way and either offer a Red Hat runtime inside SUSE Linux, or offer competitive and full installation and tech support for the current RHEL 4 and the future RHEL 5. That would be a daring move--but one that would cause a lot of confusion in the Linux market, to be sure.

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