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Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10: Page 3 of 5

Virtually every aspect of system administration can be done through the YaST GUI. All the main administration items found in Windows' Control Panel, such as user management, installing and configuring hardware, and service management, have YaST plug-ins that any Windows admin could understand intuitively.

The Quirkiness of Xen

SLES 10's server applications include mail server software, the popular Apache HTTP server and Xen virtualization software. Novell provides all these applications on the installation CD, and supports them in the enterprise--a major convenience that Windows doesn't provide.

The open-source Apache HTTP server is part of the Web and Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) package we selected during installation. SLES 10 makes setting up and using Apache very easy--since Apache was installed during the OS installation, we went into YaST and simply turned Apache on. With a few clicks, we changed the setting for Port 80 from blocked (the default) to open on the firewall; Apache was running and we could hit our Web site's default page.

Though Novell is serious about its intent to simplify virtualization, the mere inclusion of Xen is not enough to make it ready for prime time. True, there's no free counterpart in the Windows world--you'll have to shell out extra money for programs such as VMware and their support. However, we noticed several quirks when we tested Xen. Besides some minor installation problems (such as Xen's failure to initialize a sound card and a network card), we found that when we ran the Xen-enabled kernel, the host system could not see the full 1 GB of ram that's installed. The system reported 962 MB, whereas the non-Xen kernel reported 1,035 MB. In addition, virtual machines take their allotted memory when started: The host system no longer sees the RAM used by the virtual machine. Worse, after stopping the virtual machine, the host system did not get back the memory taken by the virtual machine until the host was rebooted.