Novell Delivers Open Enterprise Server, Preps SUSE Professional 9.3

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell said this week that it has begun shipping its Open Enterprise Server, a hybrid of its NetWare and SUSE Linux platforms that it has been talking up for months. Novell announced a preview of its future SUSE Professional 9.3 release at the annual CeBIT IT tradeshow in Hannover, Germany, which is the largest IT event in the world. The company also previewed an update to its ZENworks management tools.

Open Enterprise Server was announced in September 2004 and was supposed to go into beta that November. The initial beta slipped to the end of December, and that meant Novell was unable to announce the product at LinuxWorld a few weeks ago. This is a relatively minor slippage by computer industry standards, and I was expecting it in late March or early April.

The Open Enterprise Server project began prior to Novell's acquisition of SUSE, and it does two things. It allows customers to pick either the NetWare 7.0 or the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 kernel (that's Linux 2.6) and then run both NetWare and Linux services on top of either of those kernels. It is not so much a hybrid platform as a malleable symbiosis of the two platforms, which means it is more clever than most converged platforms. OES includes a full stack of server software that OES customers can deploy on their NetWare or SUSE Linux environments. This software is based on Novell Nterprise Linux Service, and includes file and print servers with iFolder, Novell Storage Services, and iPrint; identity management through eDirectory; high availability with Novell Clustering; a common management and administrative interface with iManager; and common installation and update services through Novell ZENworks.

Novell is charging $995 for a license to OES with a 5-user license, and $18,400 for a 100-user license. Basically, if you only want five users, you pay $190 per user and if you want 10 or more users, you pay $184 per user according to Novell's pricing scheme. Upgrades from any prior NetWare version or release cost 53 percent of the full license price for OES, and replacements from Microsoft Windows, SCO Unix, IBM OS/2 Warp, Red Hat Linux, and some other obscure X86 platforms cost the same as upgrading from NetWare to OES. OES pricing is, by the way, identical to NetWare 6.5 licensing, although NetWare 6.5 had a single user license for $184 and OES does not. Novell has made it pretty clear on both technical and pricing specs that OES is the future of NetWare, and to its credit, is making the transition about as painless as it can.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 is the latest rev of the cutting-edge Linux from Novell, and is analogous to the Fedora implementation of Linux over at rival Red Hat. SUSE Linux Professional will be based on the Linux 2.6.11 kernel and will include support for the open source Xen virtual machine partitioning from XenSource. The software also includes enhancements to power management and Centrino and BlueTooth wireless support, which has been evolving through Professional 9.1 and 9.2 releases. Interestingly, Professional 9.3 will have support for the Linphone voice-over-IP Internet phone, which works with the Gnome desktop GUI on top of Linux. Linphone is a French open source project that distributes VoIP solutions under the GNU General Public License. SUSE Professional 9.3 will also be configured with the Firefox 1.0 browser, have a pre-release version of OpenOffice 2.0 suite, and offer support for iPod MP3 players in both the KDE and Gnome desktop environments. Novell is taking orders for SUSE Professional 9.3 now, and is charging 75 euros (about $105) for the software.

Also at CeBIT, Novell raised the curtain a bit on its future ZENworks 7 systems management tools for Linux, which it will talk about in more detail at its annual Brainshare user conference in a few weeks. ZENworks is Novell's management tool for taking the reins of SUSE Linux servers, desktops based on the Novell Linux Desktop variant of the SUSE platform, as well as for competitive Linuxes from Red Hat and others. (You can get a sneak peek at ZENworks 7 at www.novell.com/zenworks/sneakpeek.) The ZENworks tool is a policy-driven automation tool for applying patches to Linux platforms. It offers Web-based administration of Linux clients and servers through a ZENworks Control Center, which is new with ZENworks 7. The software will include remote control of Linux platforms through incorporation of the open source Virtual Network Computing project's tool, which is also supported on Windows platforms. The ZENworks 7 tool has the capability to store so-called "gold images" of desktops and servers and deploy them to bare-metal machines and can ping the network to see what hardware is out there running what Linux and what software is running on top of those Linuxes to help system administrators do PC and server asset management. Novell says that it will release ZENworks 7 sometime in the second quarter.