Suse Linux virtualized on Windows--why?

As Suse Linux fades further from any relevance outside of Microsoft, and Red Hat and Sun make huge strides in virtualization, Novell plans to offer support for Suse running on Windows. Is there meaning here or is Novell just becoming more of a Microsoft puppet?

Microsoft and Novell announced that they will jointly support a virtualization scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization.

I can't see any production scenario where you would possibly want to go through all those layers of abstraction and performance degradation. As one commenter stated "Linux running in a VM on top of a MS host platform..because everyone wants to put their Corvette on top of a skateboard."

But, Sun also announced a partnership with Microsoft on virtualization, which leaves Red Hat and VMware without an MS relationship. Dare to dream that all the vendors will figure out a way to make virtualization consumable and portable across operating systems?

Now that Microsoft's Hyper-V is free it will be widely adopted. Which means that Windows won't be displaced at companies that are going down a virtualized path. Portability and interop have been an after-thought for all of the vendors. It's about time they started making things work together.

[The_Decider]

I can't see MS's hypervisor doing all that well, no matter the cost. Windows is too bloated of a platform to run VM's on top of it.

[msjonker]

What operating system has the best hardware driver support?... Windows. There you go.

[Peet42]

Yeah, for any given piece of hardware on any given version of Windows there exists either three or four different drivers, or no driver at all. On average it has twice as many drivers as any other OS.

[fredtheviking]

No, its linux. It support old hardware and the community produces more drivers for linux everyday. So, there you go. Why run linux top of windows? Windows already is a resource hog as it is already.

[The_Decider]

They way does Linux support orders of magnitude more hardware than Linux?

[peramica]

Can I get a comma in the first sentence?

[edeity]

Nice contradiction within a few short paragraphs.

First you deride the interoperability of SuSE and Microsoft within
each others virtualization technologies (yet somehow manage to
say that Red Hat is making "huge strides" in virtualization when
Novell and Red Hat use the same Xen virtualization technology)
and then you go on to say that it's about time they started making
things work together.

If you think that companies should be making their software work
together, then why do you deride Suse as fading from relevance
outside of MS?

Which is it?

SAP recommends Suse for customers that want to run SAP on Linux,
does this mean that Suse has fading relevance outside of SAP?

What are these "huge strides" Red Hat and Sun are making?
How about some numbers showing the poor performance of Hyper-V
compared to other solutions that you allude to?

Your statements are all rhetoric and no substance.

[daverosenberg]

Ok. Suse is irrelevant. There you go. Once again, nice astroturfing from Novell

[Goodbye Helicopter]

You get paid to write this stuff?
Please posit some insight rather than simply derision for a decision that is not made by dummies...

[idfubar]

"Announcement of support" can indicate a strategic shift; it can also mean simple contingency (i.e. update of policy collateral).

[jesass]

I agree with Goodbye Helicopter. If you are going to make claims, please provide data. Otherwise, this is just another anti-SuSE / Microsoft rant which belongs on the fanboy/true believer/ Kool Aide drinker websites.

Please earn your paycheck.

[daverosenberg]

Earn my paycheck? Isn't that what all you guys are doing who sign up for new comment accounts whenever anyone writes about Novell. Seriously, it's so lame. How much do you get paid for the astro-turf?

[JPerlow]

dave:

As a fellow CNET/ZDNET blogger and Open Source advocate I have to to say I am totally unimpressed by the lack of technical merit in your analysis. This may be Negative Approach, but throwing innacuracies out just for the sake of it and without adequately researching the subject doesn't do any of our readers a favor. Lets start with the analogy:

""Linux running in a VM on top of a MS host platform..because everyone wants to put their Corvette on top of a skateboard.""

I realize you come from a software development background and may not understand the finer points of virtualization, but in a hypervisor, you are, ahem, NOT RUNNING ON WINDOWS. EVER. Your guest OS is being abstracted. It doesn't matter what OS is residing in Domain0 as the "parent". The parent is being used as a pass-thru layer for driver support only.

Microsoft's Hyper-V is architecturally identical to Xen and was designed in cooperation with XenSource. It is a bare-metal Type1 hypervisor, and is one of the highest performing bare-metal hypervisors on the market today. It is even higher performing in terms of raw IOPS than VMWare ESX and has vastly superior hardware support. It may be sour grapes that it happens to come from Microsoft, but the truth of the matter is, when SUSE linux is running with the 64-bit hypercall adapter on it, its significantly faster than when running on ESX with VMWare's paravirtualized drivers. If we're putting a Corvette on a skateboard, its a giant carbon fiber skateboard made by Scaled Composites with two solid rocket boosters attached to it.

Jason
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow