OpenLogic today announced it will partner with GroundWork to provide CentOS support for the GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart Virtual Appliance based on CentOS

OpenLogic have announced that they are expanding their commercial support services for open source packages to include CentOS Linux. The company offers indemnification for a certified range of around 500 open source packages and a choice of either Developer Support with a four hour response time during business hours or Production Support with a one hour, round-the-clock response time.

Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable.

You can categorize most GNU/Linux distributions as either community or commercial. Community-based distributions like Debian, Fedora, or CentOS are maintained largely by volunteers and donations of services or money, while commercial distributions like Suse, Red Hat, or Xandros are backed by a company and compete directly against proprietary operating systems such as Windows and OS X.

BoxGrinder is a tool that allows you to build virtual machines (with RedHat, CentOS, Scientific Linux or Fedora as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports KVM, VMware, Amazon EC2, VirtualBox, and VirtualPC. This tutorial shows how to use BoxGrinder to create a CentOS 6 KVM guest on Fedora 17 and also how to deploy it to a remote KVM host.

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used.

CentOS, for those unfamiliar, is a clone distribution. The maintainers take the freely-available source code released by Redhat for its commercial Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product and recompile it, stripping out any trademarked artwork, then redistribute it as CentOS.

At the end of July, Novell launched SUSE Studio, which it calls a "simple and fast appliance builder". It provides a free and easy-to-use, web-based user interface to roll your own customized (SUSE) Linux distribution. The resulting image can be deployed on bare metal or as a virtual appliance on a hypervisor.

Free, community-driven versions of Linux don't often benefit from commercial enterprise support efforts.