SUSE the “perfect guest” at launch of IBM’s KVM Center of Excellence in China

The future of KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) has arrived.  On November 28, IBM launched its KVM Center of Excellence in Beijing. The center will drive global awareness and adoption of KVM as an open virtualization solution with the performance and features customers require to roll out virtualized services and clouds at the right value.

SUSE participated as an honored IBM guest and will continue to support the center. Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives at SUSE, board member of the Linux Foundation and chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, was a key panelist at the launch event. SUSE’s support for this new Center of Excellence is the latest development in our long-time partnership with IBM to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise across all of IBM’s hardware platforms and, more recently, to enhance KVM for virtualization and cloud initiatives.

During the panel discussion Alan explained SUSE’s twofold hypervisor strategy.  The first part is to run as “the perfect guest” with consistent, high performance and streamlined support on all major hypervisors and in cloud environments—to increase customer choice and reduce risk. To achieve this, we partner with leading virtualization vendors like VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix and lead or actively participate with companies like IBM in open source groups.  For example, SUSE and IBM were among the founding members of the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) and actively participate in the KVM community.

There’s a second part of the strategy, too. SUSE was the first enterprise Linux vendor to offer KVM in the box and today provides the only Linux distribution that supports both KVM and XEN. What’s more, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2 offers one of today’s most requested features, KVM support for Windows guests. We’ve also engineered SUSE Manager, SUSE Studio, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, and SUSE Cloud to fully support building and running a robust KVM environment.  That makes SUSE the “perfect host” as well as the “perfect guest.”

Even if you couldn’t be in China for the launch, you can try out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Server Pack 2 and KVM at https://www.suse.com/products/server/eval.html.