Novell has unveiled significant enhancements to the performance of its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server when the operating system is running as a virtual machine guest in a VMware environment.

The vendor has modified its flavour of the Linux Enterprise kernel to support the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI).

VMI is a communication mechanism between the guest operating system and hypervisor that simplifies the task of virtualisation and makes Linux a more efficient guest operating system when running in VMware environments.

Novell claimed that the VMI modifications, along with the paravirt-ops interface, have been accepted by the upstream Linux development community and will be included in upcoming releases of the standard Linux kernel, as well as future versions of Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Holger Dyroff, vice president of product management for SuSE Linux Enterprise at Novell, said: "Virtualisation is proving its value in the data centre.

"Our collaboration with VMware is part of a multi-pronged virtualisation strategy to create additional opportunities for customers to reduce costs and increase efficiency with Linux virtualisation."

Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware, added: " The inclusion of VMware VMI patches into SuSE Linux Enterprise Server is designed to provide customers with increased performance, improved behaviour of timing-critical workloads and better interoperability by allowing the same VMI-enabled SuSE Linux Enterprise Server kernel to run on physical machines and on VMware infrastructure.

"We look forward to working with Novell on future initiatives to make SuSE Linux Enterprise run even better on VMware Infrastructure."