Skip to main content

Buy VMware, get SuSE

Anyone following VMware's enterprise offerings will know that VMware has been "in bed" with Red Hat for a long time. The "service console" of the ESX product has been Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux based since the beginning, and many of the virtual appliance-based products (VMware Data Recovery e.g.) are RHEL or CentOS based.
But now VMware comes with a partnership announcement with Novell/SuSE, not Red Hat ! Anyone buying vSphere will get SLES for free, including patches ! Note, the offer isn't fully up just yet, they forecast a GA launch in 3Q2010. But anyone buying vSphere starting today (june 9th) will be in on the offer when it launches. Beware, "free" doesn't include support, from what I read in the press release. But SLES support will be available through VMware.
A lot of questions are waiting for an answer:
  • Will this deal impact the place RHEL and CentOS held in the VMware solution stack ?
  • What will be the response from Red Hat ? I'm sooo curious !
  • Has Novell got an exclusive deal with VMware, or is there room for a similar deal with Red Hat ?
Time will tell.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Volkswagen UHV bluetooth touch adapter & its problems

My Volkswagen car has the "universal cellphone preparation" UHV built-in. This is the main part of a car kit, but requires an additional adapter for connecting to a cellphone. At first, I was using an adapter for my good old Nokia 6310, even after I changed to the Nokia E71. Connecting was easy: pair the phone with the "VW UHV" bluetooth entity, and done. This has the phone connected to the car kit at all times, so even non-call-related functions use the car audio system (e.g. voice recognition). But progress will have its way, no matter what happens. So in comes the "bluetooth touch adapter". Instead of a phone-specific adapter, this is a small touchscreen device that slots into the UHV dashboard mount. Connecting a phone is very different now: the Bluetooth Touch Adapter connects to the "VW UHV" device via bluetooth the phone connects to "Touch Adapter" device, also via bluetooth The device doesn't allow step 2 if step 1 didn'

Reset lost root password on vSphere ESXi 6.7

VMware's solution to a lost or forgotten root password for ESXi is simple: go to  https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1317898?lang=en_US  and you'll find that "Reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi". If your host is still connected to vCenter, you may be able to use Host Profiles to reset the root password, or alternatively you can join ESXi in Active Directory via vCenter, and log in with a user in the "ESX Admins" AD group. If your host is no longer connected to vCenter, those options are closed. Can you avoid reinstallation? Fortunately, you can. You will need to reset and reboot your ESXi though. If you're ready for an unsupported deep dive into the bowels of ESXi, follow these steps: Create a bootable Linux USB-drive (or something else you can boot your server with). I used a CentOS 7 installation USB-drive that I could use to boot into rescue mode. Reset your ESXi and boot from the Linux medium. Ident

GEM WS2 MIDI System Exclusive structure and checksums

MIDI is the standard for communication between electronic music instruments like keyboards and synthesizers. And computers! While tinkering with an old floppy-less GEM WS2 keyboard, I wanted to figure out the structure of their System Exclusive memory dumps. SysEx is the vendor-specific (and non-standard) part of MIDI. Vendors can use it for real-time instructions (changing a sound parameter in real-time) and for non-real-time instructions (sending or loading a configuration, sample set, etc.). In the GEM WS2, there's two ways of saving the memory (voices, globals, styles and songs): in .ALL files on floppy, and via MIDI SysEx. The .ALL files are binary files, 60415 bytes long. The only recognizable parts are the ASCII encoded voice and global names. The SysEx dumps are 73691 bytes long. As always in MIDI, only command start (and end) bytes have MSB 1, and all data bytes have MSB 0. The data is spread out over 576 SysEx packets, preceded by one SysEx packet with header informat