Novell claims it will become the first vendor to offer a supported solution for Xen virtual machine guests, with its release next month of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack.
This is a bundle of Xen-compatible paravirtualized network, bus, and block device drivers said to enable unmodified Windows and Linux guest operating systems to run on SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 SP1 and Xen 3.0.4 with near-native performance in virtual environments on systems with Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) chipsets.
It does this by opening additional channels of communication between the Xen hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise and the unmodified guest operating systems running in a virtual environment, accelerating network and storage input/output and improving overall efficiency.