Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

As we all know, most of the focus over the last several weeks around Novell has been the announcement of our partnership with Microsoft.

In my blog posting on November 3, I noted that for such a broad and industry transforming deal that there were numerous implications that I would post about over the course of time.

What has been in the public mind has been to appreciate the benefit for the open source community. Indeed, in that first posting, my focus was to recount the benefits for the open source community. Additionally, in the follow-up press release published by Novell on November 7, there was a strong discussion of the benefits for open source.

Also, the financial terms of the deal have attracted a great deal of attention. This was also part of the 11/7 press release; reporting on required SEC filings and the financial implications of the deal. (Not my focus today, but parenthetically, very favorable financial terms for Novell.)

In this posting, however, I want to make sure that we continue to give primary focus to the original driver of the deal: customer needs and the benefits of virtualization.

Reprise: the purpose of the deal

Customer needs. Linux has arrived. While Windows has been a fixture in IT environments for a very long time, and Microsoft’s impressive revenue numbers attest to this, Linux is now a growing part of the scene. According to IDC reports, Linux is actually the fastest growing operating environment. Customers have been pressing both Linux vendors and Microsoft that these environments must work together.

Technology opportunities. Virtualization built deep into the operating system is a new technology that Novell brought first to the Linux market by shipping XEN virtualization technology in our SLES 10 shipment of Linux in July. It is now easier than ever for customers to support multiple environments on a single hardware platform. The fact that virtualization is so deeply embedded accelerates the needs for interoperability.

Server consolidation scenarios. Of course there are numerous reasons that customers want virtualization. Principle among them, however, is the opportunity to reduce the number of server footprints. This saves hardware cost, improves manageability, and helps availability.

Openness. An additional driver of this customer need is openness. Today there are many all Windows shops or all UNIX/Linux server farms. For reasons of manageability at the core operating systems level, such customers are reluctant to support applications that only run on an unsupported operating system. They would need to change their entire management strategy. With virtualization, we add choice. Windows shops can support Linux applications, virtualized on SLES – and vice versa.

So the purpose of the deal is to solve customer problems. For Novell, a leading Linux vendor, we could not solve any of these problems convincingly and quickly without the collaboration of Microsoft. That led us to seek the deal and the consequent various components of the deal. We will compete vigorously with Microsoft to push for Linux and Open Source rather than Windows. They understand that. And they will compete with us. But our mutual priority is the customer.

The drumbeat around virtualization

This is not the first time that I have noted the importance of virtualization in these pages. In explaining the importance of SLES in my August 7th posting, I characterized virtualization as the capstone of SLES 10. And my last several posts (October 3, 16, and 30) have discussed different aspects of my recent keynote address to the Infoworld Virtualization Executive Forum. We have discussed virtualization’s larger role in the business world – and how technology in general and Open Source in particular are major drivers. We have heard this message repeatedly.

Different forms of virtualization

It has often been noted that there are two primary forms of virtualization. In full virtualization, guests run unmodified on the host solutions. This provides decent performance for some applications, but obviously it is inadequate for others. An advantage is that it requires fewer code modifications to be brought to the market. In paravirtualization, the guest is optimized to more fully leverage the underlying system capabilities. This is much better in performance, although it takes some extra work.

In the context of the joint Novell and Microsoft solution we will focus on both. We will succeed in bringing full virtualization to market faster. However a very important focus is to build the optimizations required – into both SLES and Windows – to support a paravirtualized solution.

Novell’s virtualization solution

No doubt, one of the reasons why Microsoft found Novell to be an attractive partner is our demonstrated leadership in virtualization. Here are some of the key points about our solution.

• Open Source: The IT industry has evolved to the point that they want to know that the most critical pieces of software are available as Open Source. Companies can see and modify the code. They have assurance that no single company will become dominant. We are at the point that we have an accepted Open Source approach to virtualization.

• Community: The Xen Open Source project has attracted the right community. Among the key participants are operating system vendors (Novell and Red Hat – and now even Microsoft), Chip manufacturers (AMD and Intel), system vendors (e.g. Dell, HP, and IBM), ISVs, management companies, and start-ups. The right set of companies have developed consensus on this key technology.
• Paravirtualization: The technical approach is paravirtualized, allowing for vastly improved performance by exploiting hardware assists.

• Server consolidation: This has always been a key drive for virtualization. In my presentation to the Infoworld Virtualization Executive Forum, I painted the broader picture of the virtual world. I talked about a global compute architecture where we don’t even care about location.

• Support of different operating systems: In July, Novell was first to market with Xen virtualization built into Linux. Last month, we added support for Red Hat (RHEL 4) and SLES 9 guests virtualized on SLES 10. We will now work with Microsoft on Windows. And within Novell there is a significant effort to get outstanding performance for NetWare virtualized on SLES.

The point about support of different operating systems is key. We will use the virtualization technology to bring together variations of Linux, Windows, and NetWare. The winner will be the customer.

Here’s some third party validation: there’s a posting from Chuck Hollis, VP of Technology Alliances at EMC, on his blog with his take on the deal. Worth a read.