Novell has launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which it claims to offer enhanced virtualisation capabilities, advances in high availability clustering, and flexible maintenance and support options.
The company said that its new Service Pack is optimised for all IT infrastructures, physical, virtual and cloud, and offers virtualisation support, including the new Xen 4.0 hypervisor with improved virtual input/output performance, support for open source virtualisation hypervisor KVM, and Linux integration components in Hyper-V.
The new offering provides clustering advances such as support for metro area clusters, simple node recovery with ReaR, open source disaster recovery framework and new administrative tools including a cluster simulator and web-based GUI.
Novell said that the new offering with an updated 2.6.32 kernel leverages the RAS features in Intel Xeon processor 7500 and 5600 series, such as MCA recovery, improved MPIO hardware support; new floating point and cryptographic features that deliver improved performance and security like AES-NI, as well as Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise.
In addition, the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 includes improved audio and bluetooth support, as well as the newest versions of Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Evolution, which includes MAPI enhancements for improved interoperability with Microsoft Exchange.
Novell said that the new offering includes upgrades to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server; SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop; SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension; SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service; and SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack.
Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions at Novell, said: 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.
