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SALT LAKE CITY—Novell will soon release a major upgrade to its SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 line. The enhancements, announced at the companys annual BrainShare trade show, will be rolled out in the form of the operating systems first service pack, SP1.
“Service packs” usually consist of bug-patches, with few major changes. Like Microsoft with its SP2 patch to Windows XP, however, Novell has elected to make major improvements with this approach. SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 includes SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).
According to Novell, SP1 will include enhanced virtualization support and management via the latest update, Version 3.0.4, of the Xen hypervisor.
With this, Novell will also include new paravirtualized network and block device drivers said to allow Microsoft Windows Server 2000/2003/XP to run unmodified in Xen virtual environments on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 operating with chips that support Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) and AMD “Pacifica” virtualization.
SP1 will also includes updates to all key components of the infrastructure, including the cluster file system, volume manager and cluster resource manager, to ensure data integrity and availability, Novell said.
As a result, the company promises that there will be improved support for workloads such as SAP running on Oracle, DB2 and MaxDB, as well as Web services and virtual image storage.