SLES 10 server provides virtualization, availability

Version offers two new features, which will be useful after Novell polishes their edges.

By Tom Henderson, Rodney Thayer, Laszlo Szenes, Network World
July 31, 2006 12:06 AM ET

Novell's latest cut of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers a cocktail of new features that should be appealing to enterprise customers and service providers, provided they can steer around the few problems we found during our testing.

SLES, which shipped two weeks ago, is a piece of the overall SUSE Enterprise Linux family that also comprises SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and Novell Customer Care, a support mechanism combining online and 24/7 technical support specifically geared to address issues with this release of the software packages.

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Overall, the new version is comparable in speed to prior iterations and two new features - Xen, which provides server virtualization, and AppArmor, which products network applications - will be useful after Novell polishes their rough edges.

The first noticeable change with this iteration is that the K Development Environment is out of favor (though still available) and Gnome is in as the primary user interface in that it is the default and will likely be best supported by Novell in the long run.

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The kernel is SUSE's version of the Linux 2.6.16, the speed of which is comparable to SLES 9. Base process handling is slightly slower; for example, it takes 16% longer to perform a Unix "process fork + exit" (a basic execution metric), but I/O and networking are faster (see graphic below).

Tracking SLES performance
In our battery of tests using the LMBench3 open source benchmarking tool, we found the new SLES 10 platform ran pretty much on par with numbers we achieved with SLES 9 on the same hardware. This chart shows a small sample of the overall benchmark result.

Test name	Point of test	SLES 9 result	SLES 10 result
Processor fork + execve	This is a basic unit of operating system execution efficiency. It causes the kernel to span a fork and then execute a process. A lower rate is better.	606.2 microsec	639.8 microsec
Pipe bandwidth	This tests memory movement speed between kernel and user space. A higher rate, indicating more efficient transfer, is better.	525.2M bytes/sec	1045.7M bytes/sec
Socket bandwidth	This tests Remote Procedure Call to InterProcess Call, which indicates atomic interprocess bandwidth. Stated as an average transfer in M bytes/sec; a higher rate is better.	16.22M bytes/sec	15.1M bytes/sec
TCP latency	This test measures the time it takes to get a local host connection and gauges potential network efficiency through network drivers and kernel. A higher rate is better.	30.8 microsec	30.9 microsec
File Write bandwidth	This test measures how much can be written to a file in a specific period of time, which gauges file system bandwidth. A higher rate is better.	16.168M bytes/sec	43.794M bytes/sec