Novell Upgrades SUSE Linux Appliance Toolkit

Novell has upgraded its SUSE Appliance Toolkit for building workloads as virtual appliances to be sent off to the cloud. When combined with its Novell Cloud Manager, "the two together shorten your path to the cloud," said Michael Applebaum, Novell's director of appliance solutions.

As one of three major Linux vendors, Novell is repositioning itself as an independent supplier of vendor-neutral software for computing in either a public, such as Amazon's EC2, or behind the firewall in a private cloud.

With its updated Appliance Toolkit 1.1, an appliance builder can adapt a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise System 11, strip away unneeded parts until there is just enough operating system, package it with an application and format it as an Amazon Machine Image to run in Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud.

SUSE Linux Enterprise System is about to become available as a Linux option in EC2, where a simple server can be fired up at a rate that will be announced by EC2 administrators "within days," according to Applebaum in an interview. Red Hat Enterprise Linux when commissioned to do a workload on EC2 commands 22 cents per hour. A plain vanilla Linux server is only 8.5 cents per hour.

With the Novell toolkit, choices of operating system configuration and application settings can be made and the workload finished as an AMI "in minutes rather than days" for deployment to EC2, said Applebaum.

Novell has its Linux expertise built into the toolkit and now it's broadening its capabilities by varying the format into which a software appliance may be cast. In addition to AMIs, it can generate appliances in the Open Virtualization Format or OVF, which means they can be sent to different destinations operating under different hypervisors. A host running either VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Hyper-V or Citrix Systems XenServer can recognize the OVF file and reconstruct it in the hypervisor's own preferred virtual machine format. Users of OVF could send their virtual appliances as workloads to either Microsoft's Azure cloud or to the Verizon Business' cloud based on ESX Server.

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