

Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell - e1ven
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1620044120100916

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bl4k
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 alongside for web stuff).

Some customers were so desperate to move over that we actually installed and
rolled out preview releases of Win2k - since it allowed them to manage their
network using the GUI and it was a total cost reduction.

Novell simply never responded. They were still stuck on DOS when Win2k
provided a familiar GUI and much easier management. In our bespoke rollouts,
even we recognized that Win2k wasn't the best at everything, which is why we
would almost install some Linux or BSD servers as well (with Samba) (we did so
much of these hybrid installs that I ended up writing NDS drivers for Squid,
Apache and a bunch of other open source apps - I think that same code is still
being used today). Running Windows also meant that you had one unifying
network protocol - TCP/IP, instead of IPX/SPX on the network and TCP/IP on the
outside.

RFP's from government and large corporations flooded out with requests for
Windows rollouts to replace Netware. It was amazing how quickly this happen. A
lot of consultants made a lot of bank at that time ripping Novell out of the
enterprise and replacing it with Windows, and often Linux as well.

By the time Novell picked up SuSE, it was too late - they had blown the
massive lead they had in the enterprise server market and never regained it.
Sorta sad what happen to them, since Netware was a great product for its time.

Enterprise Windows, and to an extent, enterprise Linux, owe a lot to the poor
strategic decisions Novell made (or didn't make)

I hope Ximian find a good home, there is no mention if they (and Mono etc.)
are part of the Linux deal. I wouldn't be surprised if the second buyer is
IBM, but Microsoft have also poured a lot of money into Novell the past 5
years, so it could be them.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
munchhausen
> 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).

~~~
hga
Interesting.

Wikipedia claims " _In 4.x and earlier versions, NetWare did not support
preemption, virtual memory, graphical user interfaces, etc. Processes and
services running under the NetWare OS were expected to be cooperative, that is
to process a request and return control to the OS in a timely fashion. On the
down side, this trust of application processes to manage themselves could lead
to a misbehaving application bringing down the server._ "

If true, memory protection without preemptive multitasking is still basically
unacceptable (just not something you can base a healthy _server_ ecosystem on;
we had enough "fun" of that sort with non-preemptive 16 bit Windows client).

The article also notes that TCP/IP was a second class citizen at best until
Netware 5.x in October 1998, "during a time when NetWare market share dropped
precipitously...."

In general it notes Netware's kernel had a big speed advantage which became
less important as systems steadily became faster (and I suspect its tunable
caching became less useful).

------
munchhausen
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.

~~~
fname
VMware's newer products for enterprise virtualization (VSphere, 4i) are built
on top of the SuSE Linux kernel... so my guess would be a purchase to
essentially own the underlying OS kernel they build their product on top of.
IIRC, their older products were built using Red Hat instead, they made the
switch a couple years ago.

~~~
sangaya
When I was in one of the vSphere training classes the instructor informed us
that the hypervisor is completely homegrown and that only the Management
Console (which is a VM that provides CLI access) runs on top of a Linux
kernel.

~~~
arethuza
That was my understanding - that Linux instance is really a special purpose
guest running "alongside" the other guests on top of the hypervisor.

~~~
nailer
If you watch ESX boot, the Linux kernel starts first - the 'VMkernel' is
started via the vmkmod.ko module.

Not saying that VMware Inc are wrong, but Linux runs VMkernel. VMkernel may
them 'subsume' its parent kernel somehow but I'm not sure how they'd
accomplish this, nor do VMware like talking about how this is achieved.

~~~
arethuza
The way someone explained it to me is that the Linux kernel loads the
hypervisor "under" itself.

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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).

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

~~~
munchhausen
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".

~~~
nailer
Would they keep the Unix-like part of the business together?

------
hugh4life
Who gets mono?

~~~
nailer
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.

------
c00p3r
Why one need all this shitload when there is kvm?

    
    
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  64K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-amd.ko
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  86K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm-intel.ko
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 478K 2010-08-20 23:44 kvm.ko
    

qemu-kvm and libvirt based stuff with a community support?

~~~
cdavid
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 general. Vmware frees me from all that hassle that
I frankly don't want to deal with.

~~~
c00p3r
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, if I use native lvm I can get a lot of flexibility.

edit: some BS removed.

btw, there is still no x86_64 xen-host for a modern kernels.

~~~
cdavid
I feel sorry for your experience, it just does not match mine. Note that we
are not talking about the same products - I mainly use vmware
workstation/player/fusion (I deal a lot with cross platform issues in some
medium-size open source projects).

Concerning things coded in a rush, I cannot say about vmware, but libvirt and
the associated tools certainly are far from mature in my experience, at least
for an end user.

~~~
c00p3r
I had once a system which runs 64-bit FreeBSD, RHEL and Solaris on one Core-
Quad box with Fedora 13. It used for testing mostly while FreeBSD instance was
used as a Windows VPN server (mpd5) and OpenVPN.

Btw, there is an issues with last updates of qemu-kvm in Fedora 13. beware.

