Administrator Experiences with VMware and SUSE Linux

Recently, VMware announced a partnership with Novell in which they would support Novel SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) directly on VMware vSphere. Neil over at VirtuallyNil wrote about his experiences with SLES and VMware ESXI. Unfortunately, he had some problems with VMware’s additions to SLES.

To enhance the experience with virtual machines, virtual environment managers add tools to the guest environments – and VMware is no different. For SLES there are tools available that permit advanced operations directly from the virtual machine manager. With ESXI, these are available for SLES 10 and SLES 11 – but not SLES 11 SP1.

This means that you either build your own SLES 11 SP1 tools or you cannot upgrade your SLES 11 to the most recent patch level. This is unfortunate.

I have experienced this before with an application that required a particular version of Red Hat Linux (7.1 if I remember rightly) even though that version of Red Hat was no longer supported by Red Hat itself.

Also, Neil points out two other sites that have images of people’s direct experiences with the new VMware-supported SLES. One first look comes from vcritical.com (a blog by Eric Gray, a VMware employee); the other comes from Jase McCarty at Jase’s Place.