"Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."
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Member since:2005-07-06
I gather you mean what does Novell have in the way of tools like Microsoft's MMC? iManager would be the closest thing, but that's missing some things, mainly groupwise plugins. I've voiced my opinions directly to Novell about that. As for mono, I have thought of that. But, if they're going to stick with iManager, they just need to get the rest of their products merged into it. Basically, pick something and stick with it. I'll agree that they lag behind Microsoft in this regard.
NetWare, begining with version 5.1 I believe, has been slowly separated out from its services or rather the services from it. Running NCP or eDirectory is no longer platform specific. So all you're left with is the operating environment. I don't think NetWare has had a large scale rebuild in a decade or so. There is no bare metal 64-bit version currently, nor will there be ever. NetWare tends to struggle going over addressing over 4gb of memory. Third party support has been drying up since the mid 90s. Nobody wants to go through the pain of writing NLMs. It's not economically feasible. The same goes for drivers. Everything I've been lead to believe, it's a huge undertaking involving a heavy rewrite of the OS for little or no benefit over running those same services on the Linux kernel. We can't make the assumption that anyone would actually want to hack against NetWare if it was every open sourced anyway.
In terms of sales and market share, yes. In terms of pure performance and feature set, you have to take the two products out of the politics and put them head to head.
It will be one product. The issue is, you can't just up and do away with NetWare in one movement. You have to continue to support it and provide a migration path. This is a phasing out process and OES2 is just next step of that process. Moreover, OES2 has been turned into an add on package to SLES10 rather than a separate operating system for lack of a better descriptor.
I'm getting off point now. To sum it all up, my main point is that NetWare is a dead end in terms of development and Linux is the best option as a successor. Rewriting NetWare to support new hardware would be a very time consuming and expensive process. Open sourcing NetWare would be a very time consuming and expensive process. In my opinion, Novell would be wasting their money doing either. Open sourcing the services however, that's a whole different story...
Member since:2005-07-06
I'll agree that they lag behind Microsoft in this regard.
They log a long way behind, and there's no reason they should because moving to Linux should have given them what they needed.
There is no bare metal 64-bit version currently, nor will there be ever.
Basically, Novell couldn't afford to maintain it or keep up with the hardware world. We all understand that.
The same goes for drivers. Everything I've been lead to believe, it's a huge undertaking involving a heavy rewrite of the OS for little or no benefit over running those same services on the Linux kernel.
That's exactly what they needed to do if they wanted their customers to go with them. Not everything is going to work, and the concept of NLMs would have to go the journey, but everything else needed to fit and Novell needed to get everyone so excited about it that they would want to go along. That's also what I'm hinting at when I talk about graphical tools.
In terms of pure performance and feature set, you have to take the two products out of the politics and put them head to head.
Same difference. Windows Server has been eating share at the expense of Netware for years, and in terms of features Novell needed to arrest it. They havent.
It will be one product.
It isn't though, and it shouldn't have been until they released it.
The issue is, you can't just up and do away with NetWare in one movement. You have to continue to support it and provide a migration path.
That's Novell's problem, and they've done it very badly. In fact, they don't have any kind of adequate migration path. Mostly, it's left up to customers all in the name of choice. People don't want that - they want a network operating system and they want Novell to tell them what they are selling.
This is a phasing out process and OES2 is just next step of that process.
Phasing out shouldn't be necessary. At the moment, many people are caught in limbo between one and the other. Virtualisation provides Netware with something of a future for people who need all of it, but OES should have been released with all the tools necessary for people to migrate from Netware to Linux and have it be a drop-in replacement. Many jumped ship when that didn't happen.
Moreover, OES2 has been turned into an add on package to SLES10 rather than a separate operating system for lack of a better descriptor.
That's good, yes, but the two are named completely differently, and really, there should still just be one product.
To sum it all up, my main point is that NetWare is a dead end in terms of development and Linux is the best option as a successor.
I think everyone can understand that, but Novell's customers don't care and simply want a network operating system to do what Netware did with quite a bit extra. Frankly, Novell have failed to provide it.
Open sourcing NetWare would be a very time consuming and expensive process.
I'm not saying they should open source all of it - just the parts that they can get up and running on Linux.
Member since:
2005-07-06
What graphical tools are you talking about?
Exactly my point. Equivalents that can go head-to-head against its biggest competitor - Windows 2003.
What does Mono have to do with it?
Because Mono is now supposedly their official development environment for producing such tools. I don't really see it helping them much to produce the aforementioned, and badly needed, tools.
Is there a real benefit to open sourcing NetWare services...
Novell are the ones trying to move to Linux. Their Netware customers didn't ask for it, because Netware did what it was good at - being a network and file sharing OS. They just wanted Netware to be made better. In moving to Linux, Novell really needed to convince their Netware customers that there were benefits to be had, and they needed to put a lot of work into making sure that what was good about Netware could be transferred as seamlessly as possible to their Linux replacement. If you are able to open source those then it helps in getting them integrated into a Linux environment, and it also allows more people to use and communicate with Netware, which is quite important considering how Netware usage has declined.
However, I don't see how all this directly impacts OES2 and specifically OES2 Linux and whether it is a solid performer in the server room.
It has everything to do with that with respect to its competition.
Apparently it's feature equal(or better) than OES2 NetWare.
That's yet another problem. There should not be a Netware and Linux version of OES. It should be one product. Arguably, SLES and OES shouldn't be two separate products either. There should be one, as we have with RHEL and Windows 2003 with minor variations.