Novell Notes

Brainshare 2007

I'm attending Brainshare 2007 this week and there are a number of topics that seem to be on everyone's mind. First and foremost is the Microsoft agreement and what that means. In his keynote address yesterday Ron Hovespian stated "It's all about our customers." At the end of the day the agreement was done to ensure that Novell could address the needs of their customers and the realities of heterogeneous environments.

Virtualization is another topic with lots of interest. Novell is banking on the Xen virtualizaiton tool for moving NetWare customers over to Linux. One of the keynote demos showed multiple NetWare 6.5 instances running on a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server box using Xen. They are also pitching ZENworks as the tool of choice for managing any and all virtual machines in your environment.

Novell's desktop Linux offering (and server) is getting an update (SP1) and has a new sibling in a Thin Client version. During the keynote Nat Friedman and Guy Linardi showed off a version of SLED running on a Wyse thin client box. The key to this approach is the ability to build custom images with applications that run locally on the box, like Firefox, and links to applications running on a server. The key part of this demo was when Nat launched Visio from a Linux desktop and it just worked. Behind the scenes it actually launched a Citrix session to a Windows box with Visio installed.

I'll try to post more as the week unfolds.

Labels: Brainshare Novell