Mandriva’s Corporate Server 4.0 Showcases Virtualization

Mandriva, formerly known as MandrakeSoft, has made available for purchase its Corporate Server 4.0. This release is Mandriva’s attempt to exit end-user Linux and make a move against Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5 due out at the end of the year.

Like its competitors, Mandriva’s Corporate Server 4.0 is integrating virtualization into its offering. Unlike its competitors who have integrated the open-source Xen product into their operating system, Madriva is taking a different approach. Rather than simply adding the Xen hypervisor, the company will be the first to offer all three of the major virtualization technologies being made available to the Linux community – Xen, VMware, and OpenVZ.

Corporate Server 4.0 comes with the Xen hypervisor developed by XenSource. Xen will create virtual machine partitions allowing each virtual machine to get its own operating system and software stack. Likewise, the product will come with VMware to offer similar virtual machine partitioning. One can assume that this offering will be the recently released free-of-charge version of VMware Server. And finally, the software will include support for OpenVZ, a partitioning solution that is similar to Sun Solaris containers. OpenVZ is an open-source implementation based on SWsoft’s Virtuozzo product.

By offering all three platform choices, the operating system allows the end-user to choose which virtualization approach meets their specific need. Since each virtualization technology has its own drawbacks and benefits, the right virtualization approach can be used to solve the problem at hand rather than feeling forced to use one particular solution.