Novell SLES 10.2 Xen offers great promise

Novell's SLES 10.2 including Xen 3.2 is part of its Linux product line and typically is managed by the company's ZenWorks products and services. However, Novell refused to supply its Orchestrator management platform with a ZenWorks virtualization management module for this review, stating that Orchestrator is customized for each data center deployment via Novell Consulting Services and, therefore is not an appropriate product to be included in lab-based reviews. Therefore, our assessment of Novell's offering rides solely on the SLES 10.2 Xen implementation and the tools bundled with it..

In terms of compatibility, Novell's Xen supports everything that the x64 version of SLES 10.2 does. This list of supported server hardware foundations is the best of the three Xen competitors. The list of the guest operating systems it supports, however, is narrower than both Virtual Iron's and Citrix XenServer's. The Novell list includes paravirtualized SLES 10, NetWare 6.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, fully virtualized Windows 2000, 2003, XP, fully virtualized SLES 9, and RHEL versions 4 and 5. Missing from this list are Windows Vista and CentOS versions.

The initial installation of Novell’s SLES Xen is exactly the same as the installation of SLES 10.210 (see test), with the sole variation being the installation of precompiled Xen kernel. We implemented the 64-bit Xen kernel but there also is a 32-bit kernel available from Novell.

Two GUI applications are available with Novell's Xen bundle, which we used to facilitate installation. The vm-install tool provides a templated VM creation method that's somewhat similar to Citrix's XenServer templates. We used setup utilities familiar to us from our long history with SLES versions for networking and shared storage. VMs we created could be paravirtualized (usually Linux guests only) or fully virtualized Windows guests.

Novell's SLES Xen package includes a rudimentary virtualization application called Virt-Manager (short for Virtual Machine Manager, not to be confused with Microsoft tool with the same name!) — a common, lightweight GUI application included in Xen-based virtualization products.Virt-manager has an option called Create Virtual Machines, which we invoked before installing Windows and SLES as guest machines. Then we set up each VM's allocation of RAM, CPUs, hard disk and networking, and selected whether we wanted the guest to be paravirtualized or fully virtualized. If a VM will be connected to shared storage, that storage needs to be set up as a directory beforehand. This includes iSCSI or Network File System (NFS) shares used for VM storage managed from the SLES installation; they’re more difficult to allocate post-installation.

We performed simple day-to-day management tasks primarily via a single command-line-interface (CLI) command called "xm" and a series of shells built around it that let us complete ongoing VM management. Xm lets you destroy, pause, reboot, shut down and save a VM’s guest state.