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Novell Brings Linux Appliances to the Studio (not Hyper-V)

By Sean Michael Kerner on July 28, 2009 7:31 AM

From the 'more robots' files:

Novell has been talking about its Linux appliance program for over a year and now it's ready to show off the fruit of their labor.

Today, Novell is officially making its SUSE Studio online appliance building tool available as part of the SUSE Appliance Program. The Appliance program is Novell's effort to gain share in the Linux market by way of providing a route to market and deployment for software vendors.

"This program is really about making life easier for the ISV (independent software vendor), creating and updating the appliance and remotely configuring the appliance and then getting it to market," Matt Richards senior program manager at Novell told InternetNews.com

A software appliance is a software application bundled together with an operating system on a single image. A software appliance can be booted up on a LiveCD, run as a virtualized image or even used as the basis for a hardware appliance.

Though Novell is a key partner of Microsoft, Novell's SUSE Studio today (at least as far as Richards told me) does not support Microsoft's Hyper-V. Novell is supporting Xen and VMware as well as Amazon EC2 at this stage.

Considering all the hype surrounding Microsoft code contribution for Hyper-V last week, isn't it just a *little* surprising that Microsoft's primary Linux partner doesn't have Hyper-V as part of its appliance go to market strategy?

Hyper-V aside, most virtual environments today are mostly VMware or Xen based and Richards noted that Novell is likely to add Hyper-V as demand ramps up.

I first actually saw Novell's Nat Friedman demo SUSE Studio at OSCON 2009. The way I see it, it's Novell's answer to rPath builder, which is a competitive Linux appliance building solution that has been in market since 2006.

The primary difference in my view between what rPath is doing and what Novell is doing is all about the actual software. Novell's appliance program is based on a JeOS - just enough operating system - build of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). That means that all those ISVs that already have relationships with Novell (likely a few more than rPath has) are all valid targets, since they're already used to supporting/certifying on full builds of SLES.

Having an appliance program is a key initiative for Novell - I think that if they do it right, it could be the route that they've been seeking to gain share on rivals.

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