Check out this 27 page whitepaper from Novell and Intel titled "The Promise of Virtualization: Data Center Technologies for Today and Tomorrow. It shows you how to combine Linux and virtualization for server success in the data center. Want to learn how to improve your organization's resource utilization, efficiency, scalability and manageability for commodity hardware systems? SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, Xen 3.0 and Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) enables you to leverage true hardware virtualization and improve the performance of virtual servers in the data center.
From the whitepaper:
Virtualization: A proven IT approach that pools and shares resources to reduce costs, optimize utilization and create an infrastructure in which supply can dynamically meet demand.
Virtualization is the hot topic in enterprise IT today—and with good reason. It enables data center managers to make far better use of compute resources than in non-virtualized environments, and enables an enterprise to maximize its investment in hardware. In fact, underutilized hardware platforms and server sprawl—today’s norm—can be things of the past. By virtualizing a large deployment of older systems on a few highly scalable, highly reliable, enterprise-class servers, you can substantially reduce costs related to hardware purchases, provisioning and maintenance.
But virtualization offers more than server consolidation benefits. Rapid application deployment, dynamic load balancing and streamlined disaster recovery top the list of additional benefits. Virtualization technologies can reduce application test and deployment time from days or weeks to a matter of hours. This is because you can test and qualify software stacks in isolation but also in the same environment as the production workload. Virtualization abstracts the operating system from the underlying hardware, allowing virtual machines (VMs) to migrate freely between servers. This means that virtualization with policy-based automation can help you balance workloads and more efficiently use your compute resources, including power, storage, I/O memory, network bandwidth and more.
Virtualization gives your enterprise a new level of flexibility with regard to legacy operating systems. As many enterprises today run legacy operating systems on outdated hardware, virtualization provides a fresh start by decoupling operating systems from the underlying hardware. It also allows you to re-host your application and legacy operating systems on the latest available platforms by configuring them to run in a virtual machine that circumvents compatibility issues.
Furthermore, virtualization-related flexibility extends to today’s increasingly heterogeneous production environments where Linux, Windows, UNIX, 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems are all providing essential business services. With the right virtualization technologies, multiple OSes can reside side by side, sharing the same physical servers.
Intel and Novell are helping to advance the development, adoption and deployment of innovative virtualization technologies in the enterprise by building key capabilities into their latest respective processors and operating systems. Both companies are driving forces in efforts to improve performance and interoperability of existing virtualization technologies, while promoting the advancement of new innovations.
Working together, Intel and Novell—with their respective Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server10—provide the hardware and software foundations for the virtualized enterprise environments of today and tomorrow.
Table of Contents:
2 . . . . . Virtualization Comes of Age
3 . . . . . But First, a Little Background
4 . . . . . Virtualization Today
6 . . . . . Intel Virtualization Technology: Ushering in a New Virtualization Era
7 . . . . . SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Virtualization: Remodeling the Data Center
9 . . . . . YaST: Management Modules for Virtual Machine Profiles
10 . . . . . Intel and Novell: Working Together within the Open Source Community
10 . . . . . Moving Virtualization Forward
13 . . . . . For More Information
13 . . . . . Appendix
13 . . . . . Benchmark Tests
14 . . . . . Benchmark Test Suite Explanation
17 . . . . . Benchmark Results
Register on Network World's Web site to get this whitepaper.