Novell and Intel say they have the drivers that will let Windows run unmodified in a Xen virtual environment on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Intel servers fitted with Intel's Virtualization Technology. They said the paravirtualized network and block device drivers work with Windows Server 2000 and 2003 and XP. Novell is sponsoring a virtualization pilot program supporting customers that want to fully virtualized Windows on SUSE. The new drivers will be available to them first then made generally available later this year.

Servers & Global Warming
The amount of power consumed by servers doubled between 2000 and 2005, sucking up the generating capacity of roughly 14 power plants worldwide, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Jonathan Koomey in a study paid for by AMD.

And the growth of low-cost x86 servers is behind it.

Data centers and their associated infrastructure were responsible for about 1.2% of all US electricity consumption in 2005, he said, costing about $2.7 billion. (And you can jack those figures up another third if you throw in stuff like storage or network switches.)

Worldwide they demanded 0.8% of all electricity and cost about $7.3 billion.

Using IDC projections he figures server power consumption will increase another 40%-75% by 2010.