On the 14^th I attended the ‘Your Linux is Ready Roadshow’ in Edinburgh. It was an early start, I caught a lift of a fellow techie from a neighbouring campus. Takes about 2 hours from Carlisle to Edinburgh and we were there in excellent time, 9am registration for a 9.30am start.

This is part of Novells big push of Enterprise Linux on the desktop and server. They had a series of speakers including short talks from IBM and AMD. We were given a demonstration of Xen virtualisation on Novells SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, this was interesting and clarified a few things for me. I had just begun playing with Xen and was scratching my head a bit, the key thing it helped me understand was that with Xen you can create paravirtualised server instances for operating systems that support this functionality, but if you want to create full virtual machines without the para support (i.e. for OS’s that don’t support paravirtualisation) then you need a processor with this support at the hardware level. Because of the cooperation between Microsoft and Novell we could be assured that future Microsoft operating systems would be able to be run in paravirtualisation on Xen. We were shown how easy and fast it was to switch a virtual machine from one physical server to another, dependent of course on shared storage, in this case OCFS (Oracle Clustered File System) on an iSCSI host. I know from my self-study that the switch from one server to another takes less than 300 milliseconds, which is pretty impressive. They went on to configure high availability using Heatbeat2, making the virtual machine switch rather than clustering the applications, which was pretty enlightening!

The odd pop at Microsoft was made, which was only to be expected, but Microsoft bashing was not the basis of their pitch which I was pleased to see (not that I have any great love of Microsoft you understand).

We were shown OpenOffice and in particular the emphasis here was on showing it as a really viable alternative in a world where documents and spreadsheets etc were still likely to have originated or need to go into Microsoft Office products. I think one grey area is Microsoft Access compatability which we queried the experts about, but the answers we got didn’t quite tally.

I was very interested in AppArmour, I’d heard it mentioned but had never quite understood what it did until now. It allows you to armour-plate your apps by packaging them within apparmour. Apparmour then restricts the applications interaction with your environment. A little bit like a snapshot a demo was shown were an application was run whilst what it accessed was monitored then the details of this were shown and wildcards substituted as necessary for some elements of the rules identified. These rules were then applied, for example restricting what areas of the filesystem an application could access. Working in an educational environment I could see real benefits.

Pushing SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) was probably the principle focus of the day, and what we were shown of it was very impressive. It was the little things, the useability features like switching between desktops and the coolness stuff like wobbly windows and stretchy icons showing miniature previews of your documents. May all sound silly but for the end user these are the kinds of things that win them over!

We cornered one of the Zenworks experts later and queried him about the kind of support know offered for locking down SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). We explained that in an educational environment heavily locking down was important. I currently use the Novell Application Launcher as shell in our classrooms and we make heavy use of the Zenworks Dynamic Local User policy and user orientated Group Policies to lock down our Windows XP desktops. He explained that at the moment the Zen functionality for locking down Linux is geared around workstations not users, but that user orientated workstation restrictions were in the pipeline. For us this does give us some reservations about rolling it out in classrooms just now. One of the principal problems we would face also in any switch to a Linux desktop is the massive number of Windows specific applications, students current have access to approx. 300 applications! We agreed that in an office environment where maybe only a few key apps were windows specific and through the use of Wine (a utility that allows Windows apps to be run on Linux) or even Virtual Machines the move would look very attractive.

We were given a sneak preview of some of the new functionality in Zenworks that will be being announced at Brainshare – so if I told you…. I’d have to kill you, either that or Novell would despatch someone to deal with us both! It’s funny but that was the one part of the demo where I found myself thinking…. what, its all changed…. aaaaggghh! Rather than….. how wonderful… I think the pace of change just took my breath away a little.

We had a short demo of Zenworks Asset Management, which we don’t currently run, but hope to implement shortly – it handles software license compliance and hardware auditing. Also demo’d was Zenworks Patch Management, which looked really good…. all the more for a painful experience I had recently with WSUS, the Windows Update server (worthy of a blog entry all of its own!).

There was talk about future Zenworks capability for managing virtual machines from Vmware, Xen and Microsoft – this will be interesting to see. With the rush for virtualisation some of the management tools around fall short currently for this kind of environment.

We had a talk on Sentinel a fairly recent addition to their arsenal, its all to do with compliance and policing that compliance – the discussion was necessarily quite abstract, its a very big area.

AMD talked about the latest generations of processors and about heat and power becoming big issues in the datacenter, not just raw processor power. Of course virtualisation and the hardware level functions to support this were discussed. AMD wanted to make it clear that they had been involved with SUSE in ensuring total compatability since the year dot. Similarly IBM pushed its Linux friendly credentials explaining how they had centres around the globe with, I think it was 7000, Linux engineers! They had some serious people power dedicated to the open source community, the scale of the thing was impressive. Of course IBM support SUSE across their range and the can deliver a stack ready to go – the hardware, software and support. I could see the attraction, they had substituted Apache with IBM Websphere and MySQL for IBM DB2 and their pitch was centred at scalability – basically put this stack in now and you’ll be able to grow into larger capacity.

The day ended at around 4pm, so we were back in Carlisle with our goodie bags around 6pm. I’ll post a photo on my new SUSE/Novell cuddly toy… go get yours!

The next date for the tour is in Helsinki on 20th, the next UK date is the 22^nd in Leeds. It’s worth checking out. You’ll find some useful links below to find information on this event and others worldwide, plus more on their Linux products and the Microsoft/Novell working relationship. Fellow geeks should checkout the free evaluation downloads, particularly openSUSE, it’s FREE!