The new Partner Software Catalog: compatibility icons for HA, Virtualization and Integrated Systems

6 weeks ago I introduced the new data structure of the Partner Software Catalog, now I want to go into more details and explain the little icons that are visible if you drill down into a product or a special product version.

Once a catalog user has triggered a search and clicks on the green product name in the search results list the product view comes up with a list of available versions. On the right hand side of the version list he can see a little clock for High Availability, a “V“ for Virtualization and a wrench for Integrated Systems. With these icons an ISV can state that his application runs in a virtualized environment, for example. Special information can be given by the different colours of the icons: green means that the compatibility is supported, grey that there is no information available and black states that the application is not working in the mentioned environment, e.g. a black wrench indicates that the application is not working in an Integrated System. In addition to the colour the user can mouse over the icons and get the explicit information in the label.

Our listed partners can give here a general statement about the virtualized environment they use, e.g. KVM, Xen or other hypervisors. We have not (yet) implemented the possibility to add more information about virtualization in the catalog but it is planned to give the partners the possibility to add more details about support on SUSE Cloud and/or OpenStack early next year.