Both deals make use of the Xen open source virtual machine monitor project, which is commercialized by XenSource but also available separately in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Specifically, Swisscom IT Services, a subsidiary of the telecoms carrier, is using RHEL, Red Hat Cluster Suite, JBoss Enterprise Platform and other Red Hat technologies to support its Simply Managed Linux datacenters for outsourcing clients.
The SIMLUX environment currently runs about 70 SAP servers, along with 40 Oracle servers, 90 web servers and 100 application servers. The whole environment is managed using Red Hat’s Satellite Server, the company’s on-site systems management service, while Red Hat Cluster Suite is used for 20 cluster nodes.
Additionally, Swisscom IT Services is also building a cluster of virtualized JBoss application server environments as an extension to SIMLUX so that its applications can be provisioned within virtual machines.
Swisscom IT Services evaluated both Red Hat and Novell’s Linux offerings, and having taken the decision to move forward with Red Hat the company was not shy about talking down its supplier’s rival.
Xen-based virtualization is a good example of a feature that other vendors released prematurely without being able to provide the necessary stability and integration, said Thomas von Steiger, system engineer for Swisscom IT Services. We, to the contrary, want to optimize our hardware utilization without endangering the reliability for our customers. Red Hat’s virtualization solution makes this possible.
To put this quote into context, it is worth remembering that Novell introduced support for Xen with SLES 10 in March 2006, a full year before Red Hat delivered support with RHEL 5. In between the two releases, Red Hat voiced doubts about whether Xen was ready for mainstream deployment.
Swisscom IT Services also noted Red Hat’s SAP certification and its acquisition of JBoss as key drivers for Red Hat over its Linux rival.
Not to be outdone, Novell announced that electronics giant is using SLES with Xen to reduce the cost of consolidating both Windows and Linux servers with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack.
The driver pack was released in June along with SLES 10 Service Pack 1. It is a bundle of paravirtualized network, bus and block device drivers that enable unmodified Windows and Linux operating systems to run on virtual environments created with the Xen.
According to Norihito Kuniyoshi, managing director of Casio Information Service, the company’s IT provider, we estimate the software cost of Xen and SUSE Linux Enterprise for virtualizing Windows systems is just 10 percent of competitor solutions. The difference is even greater if you consider that other solutions require more expensive hardware.
Casio is expecting to halve its total number of physical servers through the virtualization consolidation project, while Kuniyoshi also cited Novell’s interoperability agreement with Microsoft as a reason for going with the Linux vendor for mixed Windows and Linux virtualization.
