The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company announced its plans to support RHEL as it introduced new virtualization technology based on the Xen virtual environment optimized for Intel Corp’s Virtualization Technology.
The combination of these two technologies means that Novell is now able to boast support for hosted Linux environments on dual core Intel Xeon processors without the need for modify the guest operating system.
Novell already offered support for Xen in SLES and SLED 10, introduced in July. The new functionality enables it to support for RHEL and SLES 9 running on Xen unmodified for migration to the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Novell said it would provide support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 on the relevant systems up to and including Level 3 (core engineering) support. A pilot program for the support offering is due to begin late next month with it becoming generally available before the end of the year.
Novell’s vice president EMEA for Linux and open source business development and sales, Phil Zamani, said the company was also working on support for Windows running in virtual environments on SLES for migration projects.
While that combination is technically possible, Zamani said it is difficult for the Linux vendors to offer support without access to Microsoft’s code. Microsoft has an advantage in this regard given that the Linux code is open source.
The company announced support for Linux running in a virtual environment on Windows via Virtual Server R2 in April and in July struck a deal with XenSource Inc that will eventually see it offer support for Linux running on Windows via XenEnterprise.
