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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.

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