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Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

reuters.com

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Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#21

Post by hga »

bl4k wrote: post #2

In the 90s it was difficult to imagine Novell ever fading away in the enterprise server market. There was no alternative comparable to Netware and NDS. Microsoft completely killed them off with NT Server and then Active Directory with Win2k. We had around 50 clients running Netware, and within 12 months of Active Directory being released, we had switched almsot all of them over to Windows (usually with Linux servers…

Hmmm ... I had no difficultly imagining that Netware would die a hard death in the early 90s. My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection. And as I recall, at least early on, the entire directory structure was in memory (this was an issue for my company in provisioning them for document imaging storage).

So if you wanted to run any 3rd party software on your Netware servers you were making a big bet on both its stability and safety (in not scribbling over the rest of Netware, including most especially whatever memory it was using to keep track of files and directories, no matter whether it had all of the latter in memory or not).

As soon as NT became stable enough (which didn't take very long at all as these things go, that group really had its act together from launch to 3.51 SP1) the value proposition was pretty clear and simple: run Netware for file and print services or run NT for both plus whatever other server software you might want (NDS was never a big issue for the sorts of systems I was involved with so I don't know the story there).

So as I recall the bleeding started before Win2K, although I can see becoming critical with the release of Active Directory.

Of course, all this assumed that Novell wouldn't make the proper strategic decisions in time, but it didn't take too long to realize they just didn't have what it took in that area.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#22

Post by munchhausen »

c00p3r wrote: post #14
cdavid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vmware is one of the few software I have ever bought, I am pretty hardcore open source otherwise. Vmware works very well, has top notch clone/backup/rollback feature, can automatically install tons of different OS. That's a real time saver. I use kvm at work where we don't have vmware licenses, and while it does work nicely, there is still no working rollback that I know of, and the network configuration is a PITA in…

Have you ever seen a crashed ESX Server with no community support, tons of home-brew utilities with wired command line arguments which throw a bizarre error messages to you that even google know nothing about? I did. ^_^ The idea is about reducing complexity and reusing community-tested solutions, not creating a new layer of complexity with a coded in a rush, badly tested poorly documented closed-source layer. btw, i…

ESX Server does not have community support, but it has commercial support.

If you are tenacious and patient enough to make it past the first tier of support, you will get your crashed server fixed, possibly faster than it would take to wait for an answer on a mailing list.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#23

Post by mcantelon »

munchhausen wrote: post #3

So what could be VMware's plans for SuSE Linux? I am not familiar enough with their strategy to be able to speculate on this question, but I am curious - it certainly does not look like an "obvious" acquisition to me. Keep in mind that SuSE Linux was not profitable under Novell - IIRC the SuSE venture finally broke even in the last FY, so it's not like VMware are buying SuSE to rake in the Enterprise Linux revenue.

Maybe they are planning on entering the cloud hosting market with an OS, with some nice SaS included, that can either be hosted on their cloud or an internally hosted cloud? Their purchases of Zimbra, SpringSource, Gemstone, Dunes, TriCipher, Itegrien and hiring of the main Redis developer seem to indicate they are concocting something interesting.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#24

Post by munchhausen »

hga wrote: post #21
bl4k wrote: post #2

In the 90s it was difficult to imagine Novell ever fading away in the enterprise server market. There was no alternative comparable to Netware and NDS. Microsoft completely killed them off with NT Server and then Active Directory with Win2k. We had around 50 clients running Netware, and within 12 months of Active Directory being released, we had switched almsot all of them over to Windows (usually with Linux servers…

Hmmm ... I had no difficultly imagining that Netware would die a hard death in the early 90s. My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection. And as I recall, at least early on, the entire directory structure was in memory (this was an issue for my company in provisioning them for document imaging storage). So i…

> My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection.

You are correct, Netware 3 ran everything in Ring 0, which also made it so fast. Memory protection was added in Netware 4, but you can still opt for running applications in non-protected address space all the way up to Netware 6.5 (latest, and almost certainly the last version).

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#25

Post by munchhausen »

larrycatinspace wrote: post #10

Does anyone know if this includes any the Unix source or copyrights that Novell had as well?

I don't think it does - it is just the SuSE venture that is being sold to VMware. I would imagine that the copyrights are held by the "rest of Novell".

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#26

Post by GBond »

munchhausen wrote: post #3

So what could be VMware's plans for SuSE Linux? I am not familiar enough with their strategy to be able to speculate on this question, but I am curious - it certainly does not look like an "obvious" acquisition to me. Keep in mind that SuSE Linux was not profitable under Novell - IIRC the SuSE venture finally broke even in the last FY, so it's not like VMware are buying SuSE to rake in the Enterprise Linux revenue.

Cloud development platform.

The acquisition of SpringSource was the the first step towards this. They catered towards the Java/Spring/hibernate enterprise developers. The SuSE branding and kernel will be used to bolster cloud development (internal & external clouds) for the LAMP crowd.

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#27

Post by zandorg »

I'm using openSuse 10.1. I got 11.3 but it was awful. I don't know how they messed up. I went back to 10.1.

Either way, Ubuntu didn't find my video card. but Suse did (it's a 1920x1200 Dell laptop). I don't know why Ubuntu didn't.

Suse is easy to configure and it's amazing to think how much a Sun box would have cost that did what this can do (my Dell M70 cost just £200 second-hand).

Re: Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

#30

Post by nailer »

hugh4life wrote: post #28

Who gets mono?

The best buyer for Mono would be Microsoft.

There is a massive truckload of .net developers who create iPad and iPhone apps using Mono (particularly via Unity3D) and even more who would if Mono had better promotion.

They'd also be able to get .net into the browser as a standard.

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