Novell Sets OES 2 Launch for September 26

Published: September 4, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The invitations have been sent, find that bottle of champagne to hit something with. Novell announced late last week that it would launch the kicker to its Open Enterprise Server hybrid operating system, code-named 'Cypress,' on September 26.

OES is a hybrid of Linux and NetWare that provides an amalgam of the capabilities of both. With OES 2, Novell is moving to a Linux kernel rather than a dual kernel strategy, which is perhaps the biggest change with the Cypress release. NetWare and Linux are merely services riding atop the Linux kernel. (OES 2 will, however, have a copy of the full NetWare 6.5 software if customers want to just use plain vanilla NetWare. However, Novell will not provide Linux services on top of the NetWare kernel, as it has done in the past.) OES 2 will have the same file system, iFolder, and iPrint services that OES 1 included, and the archiving and versioning server, the DNS and DHCP capability provided by the eDirectory server, and a number of other NetWare services will be added atop of the Linux kernel with OES 2. The updated OES will also include Kerberos authentication for Windows-based PCs and workstations hooked into OES through eDirectory or Active Directory links, and it will also support a 64-bit client for Windows Vista machines that want to access OES services. OES 2 will also snap into the Open Workgroup Suite, which Novell announced as a bundled offering in May 2006 to better compete against Microsoft's Windows stack and which has help slow the decline in NetWare and OES sales in the past two quarters, according to Novell. Open Workgroup Suite combines OES, its GroupWise groupware, its ZenWorks systems management tools, its SUSE Linux Desktop, and the Novell version of the OpenOffice office automation suite.

One of the more interesting announcements coming with the Cypress release is support for multiple virtualized instances of NetWare 6.5 running on a single physical server. This capability is made possible through the integrated Xen virtual machine hypervisor that was embedded into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 when it was launched in July 2006. The initial Xen hypervisor included inside SLES 10 could only support virtualized SLES 10 instances, but with the Service Pack 2 update to SLES 10, which shipped in June after about a six-month delay, support for other operating systems running on top of Xen was added. The delay in shipping SLES 10 SP1 may have, ironically, helped bolster sales of OES and related products in the past two quarters. Sometimes, not changing something helps sales as much as changing stuff.

In any event, Novell will be launching OES 2 via multiple Web chats on September 26--all scheduled at 2 p.m. local time in New York, London, and Sydney--and then we can put the idea to the test. With consolidation being all the rage in data centers these days, it seems likely that vintage NetWare shops will take a shining to OES 2 and its ability to virtualize and consolidate NetWare. But, companies that were desperate to do this could have used VMware's ESX Server for the past several years and accomplished the same thing. Of course, OES 2 probably will not cost as much to consolidate NetWare workloads. Novell has been very generous with its licensing for virtualized SUSE Linux, and it will be interesting to see if the company is equally generous with NetWare and OES 2.

RELATED STORIES

Novell Ships Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 10

Novell Previews SLES 10 Service Pack 1, OES 2 Extensions

Novell Previews Open Enterprise Server 2, Delays SLES 10 SP1

Novell Aggressively Launches SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

Novell Targets Windows Stack with Open Workgroup Suite

Open Enterprise Server Updated by Novell

Novell Delivers Open Enterprise Server, Preps SUSE Professional 9.3

Novell Combines NetWare and Linux with Open Enterprise Server

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot