Suse Enterprise Server gets a boost!

Novell's Suse just launched Service Pack 3, and with it came support for UEFI secure boot, larger server systems, new hardware.

"The release adds support for the latest Intel processors, such as the forthcoming "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E5 processor family and the fourth generation Intel Core, as well as the latest IBM eight core processors, the Power 7+.

Larger systems can now run Suse Linux, with the service pack adding support for up to 16TB of memory in addition to the 4,096 CPUs introduced by SP2.

Visualization performance gets a boost with commercial support for the latest open source hypervisors KVM 1.4 and XEN 4.2 and a top up to the size of virtual compute and memory pools supported by guest systems. The update also supports hardware features to improve the visualized workload efficiency delivered by the Intel's Haswell and AMD's 4000 and 6000 Series processors.

There's also new file system support, with the addition of the Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS 2) to ext3, ReiserFS 3.6, Xfs and Btrfs already supported.

Suse systems with shared storage will be able to scale-out workloads more effectively thanks to about 70 driver updates — for example, the new Open Fabric Enterprise Distribution driver will support faster connection speeds and easier fabric management.

The release also introduces LVM thin-provisioning and a new iSCSI target (LIO) for better storage virtualisation and management." -ZDNet

The reason why this is so good for us humble folk not using server farms with terabytes of data and processing horsepower is, that OpenSuse, the open source version of Suse gets hand me downs from time to time, so I hope this is some of those hand me downs.

In either case this bodes well for us Linux users. The technology continues to grow in leaps and bounds.