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Novell Upgrades ZENworks Linux Management Software
cfelde writes "eWeek reports that Novell launched a major new release of its ZENworks Linux Management software at CeBIT on Friday, with the aim of bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
ZENworks 7 Linux Management adds remote control, imaging, hardware and software inventory, a Web console, and ZENworks' automated policy management to make it a full life-cycle management suite."
New features listed in ZENWorks 7 will really help to shutter the FUD in regard to Linux's TCO.
Now CIOs will have an even more robust product to be able to tell their MS reps to stop chanting "TCO" as a reason to stick with/switch to Windows.
I'm a big tall mofo.
with the aim of bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers
Um, how about a tool that does the reverse? Something that turns the windows registry and software configurations into a bunch of sensible and human readable text files all in a single directory with sane permissions.
Although the imaging is nice. I know way too many imaging programs which do not correctly support certain bootloaders in the mbr.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
There are plenty of small businesses who will stick with MS just for the MMC stuff. I am hoping this is pretty decent, so I can get someone to switch already.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
The product is scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2005
Companies with large numbers of clients already have that funtionality. From Microsoft's own SMS in combination with Vintela's fantastic extensions for Linux / Unix / Mac management.
The catch is, most companies are MS centric, so they use SMS to manage their clients. With Linux replacing the Unix (if any) machines in those companies it makes sense to extend the existing management product, to use ONE solution to manage ALL clients.
Check out Vintela if you haven't. They offer client management, authentication and single sign on for integration of non-MS clients into MS-centric networks.
And why would we want to subject ourselves to that kind of difficulty, pain, and anguish? The tools that are already part and parcel of Unix/Linux are complete and useful for that. All it takes is someone that knows what the hell they are doing.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Actually, deploying and managing hundreds or thousands of workstations in a policy-driven fashion is critical in a large buisiness network. It's the policy-driven part that's important -- it can really cut down on the number of people you have running around changing workstation configs. The non-corporate elements around here tend to discount these sort of things, but if you're short-staffed and faced with 1,500 workstations, managment and deployment are huge issues. And up until recently, those tools for Linux werent there. They're not really there for MacOS. If you want to beat Windows, you have to not only match what the OS does for managment, you have to have 3rd-party tools as good as the ones available for Windows. And a lot of those 3rd party tools are quite good.
... here, here, here, here, here, and here.
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
Posting AC because I used to work for one of these (now hated) companies. :)
Long ago, Novell entertained the idea of replacing NetWare with Linux. This was way before the big Linux boom so management obviously just laughed off the idea. So Ransome Love took a bunch of engineers away from Novell and started Caldera.
Novell at the time was developing Zenworks and many in the group felt that there ought to be a Zen for Linux. Again, Novell management flatly rejected that idea as well, so they left novell and started up their own Zen-like product at Caldera, Volution, which I suppose didn't end up doing well.
Right. So instead of listening to their own people years ago and letting them leave for cash-starved startups, Novell is finally getting around to it 5 years later. Better late than never.
In other news, one of IBM's new sourceforge projects is SBLIM (Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability)
"The goal of this project is to provide a complete Open Source implementation of a WBEM-based management solution for Linux. "
For Novell shops this removes the (second to) last major excuse that they had to not run Linux on the desktop: desktop management. This is a very big deal and a very big day for Linux on the corporate desktop (although many Slashdotters may not recognize it).
The ground under Microsoft's castle is shifting.
The final problem is the agreements that MS has with the large PC OEMs (Does anyone _not_ buy Dell for corporate desktops?). MS will continue to (ab)use their monopoly power in this regard. Try to buy 1,000 Linux desktops and see how much you save over buying Windows: not very much, eh? Now look at how much the OEMs are paying MS for each Windows licence that they sell...
The winning punch for Linux on the corporate desktop will not be up-front price, it will be TCO. Novell is rubbing it's fist and thinking about MS's Jay Leno-size chin...
Cost of a Linux support person compared to a Winblow -> HIGH
Rightly so, considering that a Linux support/admninstrator can handle, in average, 3 times more users/machines.
morcego
The most important question is: what does it really mean for Linux users, administrators and developers?
They are not referring to making Linux like Windows. They are referring to making the management of Linux, through ZenWorks, like the management of Windows, through ZenWorks. This is an important feature for ZenWorks and its users and is a feature that Novell has been missing for some time, despite their previous claims of ZenWorks Linux support.
ZenWorks is a fantastic tool and is extremely powerful. It performs functions such as hardware and software inventory, application installation and removal, remote control, system policy management and more. But, ZenWorks primary area of support has been Windows systems. Novell claimed that it supported Linux and PDA's but, this support was very limited. Now, with ZenWorks 7, the supported features for Linux approach the level of the Windows features that have always been there.
First off, you need to understand what ZenWorks can do. ZenWorks is a system for controlling and managing workstations and servers network-wide from a single location, using policies that are stored in eDirectory, Novell's directory service. With ZenWorks, an administrator can control settings like Windows Policies and KDE kiosk configuration. With ZenWorks an administrator can install and remove applications, patches and configurations remotely from a single location. With ZenWorks, an administrator can install new operating systems or reinstall broken operating systems remotely, from a single location.
Some of these things you can do with Linux already and some of them you can't. Or at least, you can't do them easily. This new ZenWorks is supposed to make it brain dead easy to do these things for 10 systems or 10,000 systems. The key concepts are ease and volume/automation. Sure, you could write a script to ssh into your systems and install some software or what-have-you but, it will be different every time and too often requires some form of manual intervetion. Most importantly, nothing about the script will be useable on Windows workstations. You'll have to use different scripts and scripting languages for those systems so, the overhead is relatively high.
Here are a couple of scenarios. Suppose your working the helpdesk and a user calls to say that their PC isn't working. You open up the management console and quickly locate the PC in question from amongst the thousands in your firm. With two clicks you are connected to the PC and remotely controlling it. Regardless of whether the PC is Windows or Linux, the procedure is the same.
Now you see that the PC isn't actually broken, as the user reported but, it is simply missing an application because the user had moved in from another department and had not yet been configured to use that application. A couple of clicks associates the user with the application and the application is automatically installed and made available to the user. Again, Windows or Linux, the procedure is the same in ZenWorks.
Now, let's suppose that during the install of the application, the user unplugged the PC. I don't know why they did it, they just did it. They're a user, OK? Anyway, for what ever reason the disk is corrupted and the OS is hosed. You instruct the user to restart the machine and choose the appropriate option from the boot menu. The PC is reimaged with a fresh copy of the OS and the appropriate applications are reinstalled. In ten minutes the user is up and running with no user or admninistrator intervention. Again, Windows or Linux, the procedure is the same from within ZenWorks.
Now, let's assume a different scenario. This time, let's assume that your boss has decided that the company will now use the latest Windows 200X on all workstations. This is a massive upgrade that requires not only the installation of a new OS but also the installation or upgrade of numerous applications that were being used before but no longer work under the new Windows version. Even if you use RIS or Ghost
I don't know about Windows machines but for maintaining *nix ones you can use projects like radmind or Cfengine. Someone else in this discussion mentioned sblim but it doesn't look that project is ready to be used in production environments. Hopefully someone else will point to some other decent software.
Apparently you haven't used windows a lot. Use XP, go to the even viewer, look at any error. It'll say you "even number foo, check http://www.microsoft.com/foobar for more details". Great help, what if the event happens to be a network card error and I can't visit the site??
Call me when Microsoft starts including the documentation in the OS instead of giving me meaningless numbers.
Oh, and I don't think that a support site for servers that says you "click in start -> run and type regedt32.exe" instead of "modifiy registry key HKLM/blah" is a good support site. In that microsoft support article you'll see lot of text, but having a lot of text doesn't means the article is good.
The one thing I've clear is that Microsoft OLE DB provider gave me a error, and instead of saying me "I couldn't access $THIS registry key, not enought permissions", which would have gave me a clue and I could have figured out the fix myself, it gave me a meaningless error number and I had to go trought the web to see what was happening (of course OSS documentation is usually inexistent, so even that is good i suposse...)
ZENworks 7 Linux Management can trace its roots back to Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise.
What we* have done with this project is extended the really strong RPM delivery and dependancy resolution (messaged as software and patch management for Linux) and added much of the traditional ZENworks functionality.
What ZENworks 7 Linux Management aims to do is really change the story for managing Linux in the Enterprise; we're not targetting the hacker community here really (take a look at projects like OpenCarpet).
Novell will be including OS deployment via imaging as well policy-enabled AutoYaST and Kickstart (yes - it's cross distro!)
There will also be inventory and asset management, remote control and support, strong auditing and logging and the ZENworks one-to-many policy management.
Novell BrainShare is next week - we will be showcasing this and have live demo systems. There is also a 'Sneak Peek' online [registration required].
Personally I'm really excited that this will change the perceptions of Linux in the Enterprise - it certainly helps with customer migrations from Windows to Linux.
It's taken a large, distributed, cross discipline team to get this far - I'll ruin my Karma by thanking them all publicly.
* the Novell ZENworks business unit - which includes the Ximian Red Carpet Enterprise engineering and QA team.
Go on - mod me down for not being objective ;)
Evil ZEN Scientist
Now I'm not a system administrator
From your post, obviously not.
Have you heard of rsync? rcp? ssh logins? How about nfs? How about centralized home directories? How about running an application that is stored on the network?
Rsyc - Synchronizes files doesn't really help with specifics like settings in Gconf or updates to Postfix alias databases or RPM installations.
Rcp - insecure. Better to use scp or sftp.
Ssh logins - that's what I said in the original post.
Nfs - File sharing isn't systems management.
Centralized Home directories - the only way to go for network connected uses.
Running apps from the network - excellent when possible. But, doesn't work with some apps, with large apps when bandwidth is an issue, or with people disconnected from the network such as laptops.
Also, many of the above services are not available on Windows, only Linux/Unix. This limits your options for network management as even your environment seems to have Windows as well as Linux.
I'm not trying to flame you but, rather point out that it isn't a case of Windows-centric thinking. It is a case of network-wide management thinking. Thinking in terms of doing as much as possible from a central point with the greatest of ease. Volume and automation.
The imaging that you describe in your environment is likely the same one the ZenWorks uses, PXE booting. While it can be setup on almost any network it is fiddly to say the least. ZenWorks makes its setup much easier and it is only a small part of what ZenWorks does. For instance, can they take a backup image of your workstation remotely because, your hard drives S.M.A.R.T. is predicting a failure or they want to have a backup for some other reason? PXE doesn't do this but, with ZenWorks they can, and now it doesn't matter if your running Windows or Linux.
bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
Please don't. The nightmare of windos administration on Linux? There's a reason real professionals prefer Unix systems, and administration is a huge part of it.
This isn't a joke. At my 400 people company, there's half a dozen people employed just to keep the windos network running, plus another half dozen students and other cheap labor forces for simple stuff such as exchanging machines, etc. And I'm not saying it's running especially well.
On the other hand, four Unix admins keep several entire networks of production servers running.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That is true sometimes, of course. But that was not the point I was trying to make.
I was comparing people with comparable skills. Just a question of productivity due to system resources, and the fact that you will have, in the long run, lower suport calls with a unix network.
Most people tend to forget a basic fact about Unix versus Windows. Their learning curves are the inverse of each other.
To learn basic skills, Windows is (usually) easier. But the more you want to advance your knowledge, the harder it gets.
Unix is the oposite. Harder to learn the basics, and keeps getting easier and easier to advance your knowledge.
morcego
Not only that, the skillset required is much more extensive. A Linux admin has to be able to program for instance. Every component in a linux system requires far more pre-requisite knowledge and has a much steeper learning curve than it's windows counterpart.
It takes a linux admin 5yrs to get a firm handle on linux. It takes a windows admin about 3 months tops.
Like most things in life, you get what you pay for. Whether you go with the cheap admin or the system that requires cheap admins, you get lower quality either way.