Novell will today launch Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 10, the first commercially-supported version of Linux to include the Xen open-source virtual server technology, presenting firms with a new way to consolidate servers and run multiple applications and operating systems.

IT Week Labs tested a pre-release version and found Suse’s support for Xen made it much easier to build, deploy and manage virtual servers, compared with other Linuxes with Xen included, such as Red Hat Fedora Core 5.

Xen support has been integrated into the Yast setup tool’s control panel, and SLES now includes an implementation of the Oracle Cluster File System version 2, designed to handle large files in clustered environments. This will be particularly important to firms using clusters of SLES 10 systems to build a Xen server farm. SLES 10 also includes full Common Information Model (CIM) support for Xen. CIM provides interfaces to underlying software components, and the Xen instrumentation means third-party management tools can work properly with Xen.

While the hardware requirements for SLES 10 are relatively low compared to those of a Windows server, firms hoping to use Xen to host Windows virtual machines will need to run SLES on a system fitted with sufficient RAM and disk space for Windows, plus a CPU that has on-chip virtualisation support, such as an Intel Xeon with VT or an AMD Opteron with Pacifica.

SLES 10 also has an impressive new SELinux-style security subsystem called AppArmor. This reduces the risk of hacking attacks and has graphical tools to create security policies for applications. We used it to lock down the Firefox browser to guard against hackers.

Xen built in to SLES offers an interesting alternative to VMware, widely regarded as the most powerful virtualisation technology for volume systems. VMware last week released VMware Server (VS), its free virtualisation tool that, like Xen, runs on top of a host operating system. While Xen requires a Linux host, VS can run on top of Linux or Windows and benefits from being based on VMware’s mature GSX Server.