This news is big. Just 5 days ago I was talking about how important license mobility is in the cloud environment. Today, VMware and Novell announced that VMware will offer full support from VMware GSS no less for SUSE Linux. You can call VMware’s toll-free number and get support for the OS and the virtualization environment in one stop. What’s even better is this announcement also makes it so you can transfer your SUSE environments from your enterprise to a VMware powered cloud without having to worry about licensing constraints. That’s huge on all accounts.

As part of this partnership VMware will also begin to standardize the appliances we’re shipping on SUSE Linux. Previously a lot of the appliances that went out the door were on CentOS because of the rather generous redistribution rights. With the new VMware-SUSE partnership we can now standardize on a more main-stream Linux distribution that’s supported throughout the enterprise.

Good news all around. I just hope we continue the push with other Linux vendors that are out there or they at least follow suit with the license mobility aspect of this announcement. You can read more about the announcement on the VMware News site.

I just got the email update below sent to me about VMware Tools Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs). What is an OSP? Basically VMware has broken out the tools into their own packages. This way you can take these OSPs and use your existing software management and deployment tools to install and upgrade VMware Tools. I had previously written a small script to go through and upgrade VMware Tools programatically. I presented that tool at VMworld 2008. It looks like my little script has now been replaced by a much more elegant way to upgrade VMware Tools. Now only if we could get something similar for Microsoft operating systems.

Here’s the email with the details:

We are pleased to announce the General Availability of VMware Tools Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) for Linux.

VMware Tools OSPs are separately downloadable, light-weight packages which are specific to each supported Operating System and VMware product. OSPs are designed to facilitate easy installation, upgrade and management using the native software management tools of the operating system which it supports. OSPs provide an alternative to the existing mechanism for installing and managing VMware Tools and are especially well suited for large scale deployments.

VMware Tools OSPs are available for the following VMware products:

ESX 3.5 Update 2
ESX 3.5 Update 3

This release provides OSPs for the following operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) [GA release and Updates 1 through 7]
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) [GA release and Updates 1 and 2]
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9) [GA release and Service Packs 1 through 4]
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES 10) [GA release and Service Packs 1 and 2]
• Ubuntu Linux 8.04 [GA release and the 8.04.1 update]

For a complete set of instructions for downloading, installing, and upgrading VMware Tools OSPs, please see the VMware Tools Installation Guide Operating System Specific Packages, at:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/osp_install_guide.pdf

Regards,

The VMware Tools OSP Team