Novell Unveils SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 with Service Pack 1

Novell (News - Alert) has updated the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 with Service Pack 1, which features improved virtualization, availability, as well as more flexible maintenance and support.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 is designed for all IT infrastructures - physical, virtual and cloud - and its features include:

• Improved virtualization support including the latest Xen 4.0 hypervisor and the KVM open source virtualization hypervisor, as well as Linux integration components in Hyper-V - which the company says is a first for the industry.
• Improved availability with clustering advances such as support for metro area clusters, and simple node recovery with ReaR, an open source disaster recovery framework.
• Improved security.

With SP1, Novell is also offering flexible support options that will allow customers to remain on older package releases during the product's life cycle, and will make it easier to use upcoming service packs by allowing customers to decide on their own when and how to upgrade.

 "With SP1, not only are we delivering technical innovations that allow them to run their mission-critical workloads reliably, securely and affordably, we're also providing commercial support and partner programs with unprecedented flexibility, innovation and control," said Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell. "Suse Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 gives our customers superior investment protection through a low-risk, highly-capable platform that they can deploy and rely on for years."

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 also contains major upgrades to the following products:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, a clustering product
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, Novell's specialized Linux solution for retail computing
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack, a set of drivers which improves the performance of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual guests

These upgraded products will be generally available on June 2.

The SP1 product was presented at Novell's BrainShare event in Amsterdam.

Novell's partners provide more than 5,000 certified applications for SUSE Linux Enterprise.

In a related matter. Novell and Vodacom Business have partnered to integrate much of Novell's portfolio including the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to securely manage and optimize cloud computing services.