SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware – and our alliance with VMware inked in September 2010 – continues to offer vSphere customers a proven enterprise Linux distribution for their virtualized environments. This is yet another proof point of SUSE’s commitment to deliver the best products, services and solutions to our customers.  According to a statement from Nils Brauckmann, President and General Manager of SUSE in a May 2011 press release:

"By operating SUSE as a separate business unit focused on the Linux marketplace, we can accelerate our delivery of high-value Linux solutions that help organizations enhance growth, reduce costs, tame complexity and spur innovation. We have the world-class engineering resources, partners and state-of-the-art technologies to succeed. Now we are sharpening our focus on making SUSE Linux Enterprise the preeminent Linux distribution across physical, virtual and cloud environments."

If you’re attending VMworld this week, stop by booth #747 to learn if you qualify to:

• Get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware vSphere
• Receive patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware at no cost
• Run unlimited number of virtual machines per qualified vSphere host

In addition, vSphere customers can streamline their support experience by receiving technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware directly from VMware.

For more information, check out VMware's announcement and download the Getting Started Guide.

Today Novell announced the general availability of Novell Identity Manager 4 Advanced Edition.  As Novell's "WorkloadIQ Guy," I thought I'd share a post from my blog about why identity management is central to WorkloadIQ. And since it's baseball playoff season, I think comic geniuses Bud Abbott and Lou Costello explain it best, “look Abbott, if you’re the coach, you must know all the players.”

Their classic Who’s on First routine can depict what it’s like to attempt a move to cloud computing without first establishing an enterprise-ready identity foundation.

Before you consider moving workloads around, you need to know who has access to what, what proprietary data is in the workload, what will happen once the workload has executed—as well as a host of other important characteristics and processes necessary to ensure reliable performance, security and policy compliance.

Identifying who has access is well understood. Employees, partners and vendors all have identities at this point, and most organizations understand their roles. Companies have invested millions of dollars to define policies that limit what people in these roles can and can’t do.

Identities must go beyond who to include what. That’s because you must be able to manage what people have access to. Therefore, identities must include technologies—everything from desktops, laptops, printers, databases, storage devices, line-of business applications—the list goes on to include virtual resources as well.

Identity is the common characteristic that spans all information systems—both physical and virtual—which is why Novell believes identity is the point of integration for intelligent workload management. Identity management products such as Novell Identity Manager 4 greatly simplify this process by automating provisioning, user access and policy management. Not only does identity manager provide a standard view of identity across physical, virtual and cloud environments, it integrates with security information and event management (SIEM) products such as Novell Sentinel and SIEM products from other vendors to ensure policy compliance and increase management control.

The process of integrating identity with today’s network-connected resources can be an arduous task. Identity Manager 4 greatly simplifies identity integration, offering plug-and-play integration drivers for more than 300 leading business applications, databases, email systems, directories, operating systems and phone systems.

Establishing an enterprise-ready identity foundation provides significant benefits today to help you control costs, manage complexity, ensure compliance with business and regulatory mandates, and protect your company’s intellectual property. Regardless of where you are with cloud-deployment today, infusing your enterprise with identity intelligence will help you push intelligent workloads beyond your firewall with confidence when you’re ready. Without errors or confusion.

Working with Harris Interactive, we've just wrapped-up a detailed research project into cloud adoption, and the results are fascinating. We talked to over 200 senior-level IT executives from around the world, asking them their views and experiences with virtualization, cloud, and more.

Initial results suggest that the pace of adoption of cloud computing is much higher than previously reported, at least in many industry sectors. And when we looked at the types of technologies being adopted, and at the issues respondents are facing as they move to cloud, we found even more surprises.

We'll have more results to share in the coming weeks. Have a great holiday weekend.

As part of this landmark agreement, customers can deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware® in VMware vSphere™ virtual machines and will be entitled to receive a subscription that includes patches and updates at no additional cost. In addition, VMware and its extensive network of solution and channel partners will market and sell customers the option to purchase technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivered directly by VMware for a seamless support experience.

VMware and Novell have both invested in delivering solutions as software or virtual appliances, providing customers a pre-configured package of OS plus application that is easier to deploy, maintain and manage. Several VMware products are already distributed and deployed as virtual appliances. Standardizing virtual appliance-based VMware products on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware will further simplify the deployment and ongoing management of these solutions, shortening the path to ROI.

This is a significant agreement for the Linux, virtualization, and cloud computing markets. Gartner research indicates that at the end of 2009, 18 percent of enterprise data center workloads had been virtualized, but the number is expected to grow dramatically to more than 50 percent by the close of 2012. VMware is the clear market leader in virtualization solutions, and this agreement is a tremendous opportunity for Novell's Linux business. To support customers moving to a cloud infrastructure, both companies also intend to provide the ability to port SUSE Linux-based workloads across clouds. Such portability will deliver choice and flexibility for VMware vSphere customers and is a significant step forward in delivering the benefits of seamless cloud computing.

This strategic partnership gives VMware and Novell customers a simplified and lower-cost way to virtualize and manage their IT environments, from the data center to the cloud. It gives our partners exciting new solutions with which to modernize their customers' IT environments and deliver significant ROI. This agreement is a strong validation of Novell's strategy to lead in the emerging intelligent workload management market and our goal for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to be the most portable operating system foundation across the broadest heterogenous physical, virtual and cloud environments.

These days it’s hard to get excited about anything short of the most innovative solutions. Still, it takes time and effort to stay on top of it all and then be prepared to sell it internally to your organization. Linux, largely due to its roots in the open source community, consistently leads the market with rapid innovation and feature-rich development.

As a result of the past economic challenges, most recent innovations have focused on impacting the bottom line—smart ways to cut costs, increase efficiency, and generally do more with less.  Here are five areas of innovation we see making a difference now.

1. Virtualization – The birth of virtualization enabled enterprises to significantly reduce the risks and challenges of computing across multiple environments, while granting you secure and compliant access. While the associated cost savings and increased flexibility have changed the IT landscape, more recent innovations in identity, security and compliance are making your intelligent workload management a simpler reality.

2. Hardware advances — Chipset manufacturers like IBM (Systems E and Systems P environments), AMD and Intel (x86 and x86-64) have launched recent releases that are translating into great strides in system performance, particularly for businesses with large servers. The Intel® Xeon® Processor 7500 Series, for example, is now providing a 5 to 8x performance gain, creating great flexibility for enterprises looking to scale.

3. Patching methodologies – A bug used to force your hand, but patching updates just got a lot more user-friendly. Want to update only what’s broken? With new solutions that create more flexibility and less downtime, fixing a bug doesn’t need to cost you unnecessary time and money.

4. High availability extensions – Disaster recovery isn’t a scary or costly exercise anymore. For example, you can now affordably manage clusters spread across multiple data centers within a metropolitan area, providing high availability for your most mission-critical applications. Create a stretch cluster in your city, and if there’s a power outage or disaster, your applications are protected and can be brought online in another local data center. Other solutions allow you to restore an individual server that’s not part of a cluster, providing real-world business continuity.

5. Support – While it may not come in a box or a download, support stands strong as an innovation that’s making a difference in the marketplace. With everyone consuming the same code, the best technology remains important, but the difference in user experience lies with the relationships you form from the time you first install. The most innovative companies are committed to nurturing their relationship with you and placing a top priority on supporting the best user experience with Linux.

What did we miss?  Want to learn more about how Linux can help you innovate?  Register to attend a Linux Day near you.

ACS, a Dallas, Texas-based Xerox company – and Novell strategic partner – provides a variety of business process, information technology, and systems outsourcing to commercial and government clients worldwide. In other words, they’re the people you call when you need your technology to work.

A major part of ACS’s success is the company’s expertise in providing customers with truly one-off solutions. Whether a company is interested in outsourcing its help desk or its entire IT environment, ACS offers solutions that are custom-tailored to the customer’s exact needs.

As cloud computing emerged, ACS launched a major internal initiative it termed the ACS Management Platform. Or AMP, for short. The goal of AMP was to give customers and business partners visibility into the cloud-based platforms that their services would be hosted on. In practical terms, that meant configuring, provisioning, adding an identity fabric, and managing everything within the cloud.

Because ACS didn’t want to rip and replace, it turned to Novell solutions to complement its existing infrastructure:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is one of the operating platforms made available to ACS customers.
• PlateSpin Orchestrate is the workflow tool for provisioning.
• PlateSpin Migrate moves workloads into the cloud.
• PlateSpin Recon discovers all physical and virtual environments for providing visibility into the outsourced environment.
• Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager are used for provisioning, access management and directory synchronization.
• ZENworks Configuration Management is ACS’ software configuration and delivery tool of choice.
• ZENworks Linux Management is the Linux configuration tool ACS uses.
• Novell Sentinel provides automated security information and event management for true policy enforcement.

With these Novell solutions in place, ACS is able to give its customers the value they’re looking for. Results so far have included increased process efficiencies, improved data accuracy, shorter billing cycles—and lower overall costs.
Just like business needs, clouds are constantly evolving. ACS has found a way to deliver value in clouds of every shape and size.

Novell is excited to serve as a founding partner of IBM's cloud computing initiatives, as part of our broader vision of flexible, secure and portable enterprise computing. We're proud to support Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, announced today. This new offering will help customers reduce provisioning times, make better use of IT resources and reduce labor costs. Novell's strength in enterprise infrastructure software, expertise in supporting heterogeneous IT environments, and leading ecosystem of supported Linux applications enable us to play a major role in cloud computing.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is today a key operating system platform within the IBM cloud, having proven its mettle as the first OS available for the IBM developer cloud during IBM's technical preview and beta release. With Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, Novell expands our cloud leadership. We continue to innovate and partner with IBM across all IBM hardware platforms (System x, System z and Power Systems), while optimizing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for all major virtualization platforms (Xen, KVM, VMware, Hyper-V on x86 – as well as z/VM and PowerVM). This gives our customers maximum choice, flexibility and value.

The cloud computing world is a dynamic one and the journey is just beginning for many organizations. With Novell's expanded partnership and offerings with IBM, we look forward to making that journey a secure, manageable and profitable one for customers.

I'm also interested in hearing your views toward cloud computing. How do you plan to use cloud-based offerings? What benefits or inhibitors have you experienced?

Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development, Open Platform Solutions, "HP and VMware are critical virtualization partners for Novell, and we are excited by our ongoing collaboration to jointly develop solutions that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization investments. We offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as part of the HP Solution Builder program to provide users with the benefits of our operating system's full optimization for VMware ESX on HP BladeSystems — a combination with all the necessary components to deliver a cost-effective, high performance virtualization environment for enterprise data centers."

On the virtualization front, Dell announced two business-ready product configurations to simplify the design, procurement and deployment of virtual enterprise infrastructures. Critical to optimizing virtual environments is the ability to support mixed IT environments, enabling enterprises to easily manage, optimize and protect all workloads in the data center. To make this happen, Dell turned to Novell and Platespin Migrate.

With broad support for Windows and Linux, as well as leading server hardware and hypervisor technologies, Platespin Migrate enables enterprises to profile, move, copy and replicate data, applications and operating systems across infrastructure boundaries to make physical and virtual environments work as one. Dell will ship Platespin Migrate with Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology, making the move to virtualization easier, quicker and more efficient.