Here’s a nice overview article from Ken Milberg on SearchOpenSource.com which talks about features and benefits of Linux on the mainframe platform compared to Unix – in general terms. The short of it is that Linux on the Mainframe can provide the “best of both worlds” — the innovation and “flexibility of Linux, along with the availability and support of an IBM mainframe”
While we’re on the subject, here’s a website with a lot of great information and links related to Linux on the Mainframe… http://www.linuxvm.org
The openSUSE KIWI Image System provides a complete operating system image solution for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as for virtualization systems like Xen. KIWI is an ideal solution for creating and imaging thin client devices.
KIWI is a complete imaging solution and can be split up in to three distinct parts.
- Physical Extend:This stage “prepares” a directory containing the the contents of your new filesystem based on a software package source (SLED 10) and an image description file (config.xml). In this stage you determine what packages you want installed on your image and what configuration files should be included. As part of the process “smart package manager” will handle dependencies.
- To “prepare” the physical extend enter: kiwi -p /path
- /path is the path to the DIRECTORY containing your config.xml file
- The output of this command is the directory /tmp/kiwi.<random> where random is a random string
- Logical Extend: This stage is based on the previous “physical extend” and “creates” an operating system image. You can utilize the images.sh configuration script while creating the logical extend to clean-up your image or to perform additional configuration. This script is called at the beginning of the image creation process.
- To “create” the logical extend enter: kiwi -c /path1 -d /path2
- /path1 is the path to your previously prepared kiwi.<random> directory
- /path2 is the desired “destination” path of the output of the command
- The output of this command is the image file and the associated MD5 checksum
- Deployment: There are several ways to deploy the new image.
- Netboot: ATFTP is used to deploy the newly created image via PXE. You can utilize KIWI to create a special kernel and initrd for the purpose of deploying a KIWI based image. You have the choice of loading the image into volatile RAM or onto non-volatile, persistent storage like flash memory or a hard drive. KIWI will check whether a KIWI image is installed on the target system. If the version installed on the target system is older than the one being served the image will be updated.
- Locally Accessible Hard Disk: The image can be installed by dumping (dd) the image file on a previously created partition on this disk. To activate the system a boot manager like grub or lilo can be used.
- Paravirtualized: In case of a paravirtualized target system like Xen, the image can be be installed by copying the image file on the target system. To activate the virtual system a configuration must be provided which points to the image in some way. One possibility is to use a loop mounted location.
- Fully Virtualized: In case of a full virtualized target system like VMware the
image represents a virtual disk as a file which can be “played” by the virtualization
system.
While the KIWI Image System is under very active development, customers are realizing the value of this very exciting technology and deploying TODAY!
For more information check out the following websites:
This interesting article from CNet points out what most of us already know… Windows is anything but inexpensive. It’s interesting to see some of the arguments that MS makes about this point…
Microsoft General Manger Brad Brooks argues that Windows is a bargain,… “If you break down the cost of the software over the life of the PC, it works out to be less than how much you’d spend on milk for your family over that same period of time,” Brooks said.
(Personally, I have small kids at home and we go thru quite a bit of milk) – I figure the average family drinks 1 gallon of milk per week ($3.00 per gallon) x 52 weeks = $156.00 per year in milk. So I suppose when you consider that MS is currently releasing a new desktop every 5 years — milk is more expensive than Vista. If you start to figure in things like required hardware replacements or upgrades, and an upgrade to MS Office 2007… the difference is price begins to shrink rapidly.
If you consider a Linux desktop alternative – such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 which includes OpenOffice (compatible with MS Office, btw) – you will end up with the features and functionality that makes the typical office worker productive, at a far better price-point than either Vista or milk. 
You’ll also end up with freedom from proprietary lock-in, and freedom from the annoying milk moustache.
The Bexley City Schools couldn’t afford to upgrade to Windows XP from Windows ME, so they chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop instead, dropping the costs from almost $500,000 to about $150,000. You can read the article here, and then check out the Novell Case Study that was done, very helpful in understanding the use of OSS in education.
Dell recently posted a survey on its website asking customers to chime in and let them know what they’d like to see from Dell.
As of this writing, the top 5 requests are:
- Preinstalled Linux on all Dell PCs
- Preinstalled OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office
- Linux Laptop (where all laptop components work with Linux out of the box)
- No extra software option
- Have Firefox preinstalled as an option
Clearly, somebody out there is interested in using Linux on Dell equipment 
A small article about these survey results has also appeared in Business Week. Here’s an interesting snippet from the article…
“Dell says it’s already listening. In a Feb. 23 posting on IdeaStorm, the company said it’s working with Novell to certify its business desktops, notebooks, and workstations for compatibility with Linux, and is working with other Linux distributors about additional certifications.”
In this nice “state-of-the-union” article about KVM and its position in the general Linux and open source marketplace, the author talks about one of the key differences between KVM and other virtualization technologies — such as VMware and Xen — that KVM’s code has been entered into the Linux kernel code.
This makes KVM a very interesting technology to keep your/our eyes on… but, despite getting some good press lately, it seems that KVM won’t be ready for primetime for 1-3 years (depending on who you believe in the article).
Suffice to say that while there are some great technical developments (generally) in the world of virtualization, there’s still much work to be done. Thankfully, Xen and VMware are available now and ready for use, so you can start realizing the advantages of virtualization in the data center sooner than later.
For those who’ve never used it, rsync makes backups easy, it can be used to sync two directories on the same machine, on two different drives, even on another machine without any mounting necessary (through SSH), and with the right settings, you’ll sync just the changed bytes of the files, saving network bandwidth and time.
You’ll see plenty of examples out there, but for myself I typically backup my /home/rbrunson/novell data directory to a USB drive with the command:
rsync -avz /home/rbrunson/novell /media/BFD300G/novell
The -a stands for “archive mode” which includes handling symlinks, devices, attributes, permissions, ownership, date and time etc. The -v stands for “verbose” and shows you what’s happening and to what file (a LOT of output) and -z is for compression of the data, such as when you send it over a LAN or WAN connection to another machine, not necessary in this instance, but deeply part of my CLI muscle memory.
Enjoy the articles
Rsync and Linux
Create Incremental Snapshot Backups with rsync and ssh
Easy Automated Snapshot-style Backups with rsync and ssh
GUI Tools and Front-ends for rsync
Hope you find these helpful.
Rossb
Did you miss the webinar entitled “Improving Retail TCO with Linux” that was held on February 22, 2007? If so, you don’t have to worry… it was recorded. You can access the presentation and download the slides from this website.
The focus of the presentation was in learning how to “cut TCO with SUSE Linux Enterprise in all tiers of your IT environment”. Remember, that when you think of the retail industry, you can apply Linux technology in far more places than simply the front-end point-of-service machines. In addition to POS, Linux can help with kiosks, in-store servers, in-store desktops, in-store applications, and of course data center databases or applications.
I wonder what Red Hat’s plan is with respect to pricing of virtualization using Xen on RHEL? That information is not yet public… but here’s a blog entry from ZDnet which seems to hint that they plan on undercutting VMware — and that this would be an industry shaking move. That is, when RHEL 5 finally ships. It’s already several months late.
!!! HELLO !!!
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10:
- …has been shipping since July 2006
- AND includes Xen virtualization
- AND there’s no additional charge for Xen beyond the normal SLES subscription
- AND you can run as many virtual machines as you want without additional cost on the same physical server
- AND it’s available today
- AND our partnership with Microsoft will enable us to easily get paravirtualized and fully virtualized Windows servers running on Xen very soon!
You could wait for RHEL 5 to ship… or you could start taking advantage of this virtualization technology today with SLES. Wouldn’t you prefer to use a product that leads in the technology arena, rather than one that simply follows? We don’t call SLES the “best engineered” enterprise Linux distribution for nothing…
Here’s a blog entry from ZDnet’s Ed Burnette in which he does a little Q&A with Azul System’s Chief JVM Architect, Cliff Click. In the writing, he talks about some of the rationale why the massive amount of core’s in Azul’s systems should be of interest to everyone, and something to think about for the future. Sheesh… 768 cores is ALOT of horsepower!!
He talks about the multi core systems from the perspective of massively parallel program execution, but it’s not much of a stretch to think about what a 768 core server could mean for Xen virtualization. Simply put, it’s a game changer. Can you see how powerful a solution this would be? Consolidation of many entire data centers down to a handful of servers or racks — it may be closer than we think…
Of course, the Novell and SUSE Linux team have Xen virtualization in their sights… and plan to take advantage of every nook and crany of these multi-core processors. In fact, we already do! Talk about future-proofing and going with a winner!
In a more direct line of sight… Intel recently showed a prototype of an 80-core processor — sweet!
At last, details of what will be happening, from the press release:
REDMOND, Wash., and WALTHAM, Mass.—12 Feb 2007—Microsoft Corp. and Novell today unveiled more details about their joint technical roadmap and the benefits customers can expect from the collaboration. Microsoft and Novell are engaged in joint development on four areas of technology that address significant problems faced by enterprise customers today: virtualization, Web services for managing physical and virtual servers, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility.
Full Press Release
MS Press Release (added)
An interview with Roger Levy, head of the group that produces Open Platform Solutions about Xen, KVM and Novell’s role in virtualization. He takes some tough questions and gives a view of what we can expect in the Virtualization arena.
In what can only be described as a ground-breaking announcement, Novell and Intel announced Monday that they have released the needed drivers to let Windows 2000/XP/2003 run unmodified under Xen virtualization. This is particularly good news for our customers who wanted to virtualize Windows 2000 servers but worried that they wouldn’t get the performance they wanted or that the changes that had to be made to the OS would break the functionality.
For those who had attended of our great Linux Day events last year, we’re at it again! The first one was the 31st of January in Binghamton NY, and it was very successful. For those who haven’t heard of or attended one of these, they are a full day of free technical training on the “Green” or SUSE Linux Enterprise side of Novell’s product line. It’s a full day including a detailed overview of the latest in Desktop and Server technologies including OES (Open Enterprise Server 1 and 2), very complete and technical details on the latest Security, Virtualization, Training and Troubleshooting possibilities with loads of demos and lots of tips, tricks and fun stuff. We break for lunch (included in the free price) and go until about 4:30 or so.
Even with major snowstorms the evening before and day of, we packed the big room and except for a couple of sysadmins who had to go revive dying and dead servers, everyone stayed there and focused all day!
We have a great momentum for these events, they were very popular last year and the response this year was awesome! After the event we typically do a lot of followups with people who want us to come present to internal teams or are ready for a lab or Proof of Concept. We typically get 90% of the people registered to show up, and of those 90% are there by the day’s end, which is awesome. Of course we do give away penguins, t-shirts and geckos, so that might help keep attendees in their seats!
We are about to announce a number of upcoming events, the landing page for these just went up, it and the calendar for events are the best resources to find these and other events:
Calendar of Events (make sure to select Americas and uncheck all but Open Platform Solutions)
Linux Day Landing Page (schedule and other items to come very soon)
I’ll post a report after each event so you can see the progress and please email us or comment on this posting if you have suggestions.
See you at the upcoming events!
Ross
We all know that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is the best Corporate Desktop yet, but how about the consumer space? Great article that discusses the pluses and minuses of using openSUSE on the desktop.
If you’re using or considering FireFox as a browser (and who isn’t, really?) then this interview is an excellent view of FF’s past, present and future.
There’s a blog entry I was reading this morning from ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley. She was highlighting the fact that in a recent blog entry, Microsoft had been saying only certain versions of Vista may be virtualized on Parallels (virtualization on Mac OS X). Likewise, on another blog, they stated that there was no movement on being able to virtualize Mac OS X on any other platform (such as Linux) – because it’s against the EULA.
I wanted to just point out what seems to be hipocracy on this topic… MS only letting the most expensive version of Vista be legally virtualized, whileApple won’t let anyone virtualize its OS.
For the record, those of us in the Linux community — especially SUSE Linux — have no problem with you virtualizing the OS. In fact, we have what I think is an outstanding virtualization policy. Are you taking advantage of it?
Learn how Linux is helping retail IT organizations improve security, IT freedom and most importantly, cut IT costs.
More world-class retailers are turning to Linux every day to help them innovate, upgrade their IT infrastructure, and improve security while lowering TCO. Why? Because Linux gives retailers the power and flexibility they need to choose best-of-breed systems for each area of their retail infrastructure—from POS machines to datacenter servers. What’s more, Linux integrates easily into all existing IT infrastructures, allowing retailers to leverage their current hardware investments.
Attend this Web seminar to learn how you can use Linux to:
- Cut point-of-service (POS) software costs by replacing Windows and DOS with Linux
- Dramatically reduce TCO by integrating Linux into every tier of your retail IT infrastructure—from (POS) and in-store servers to headquarter data centers
- Eliminate proprietary software licenses by running a Linux Desktop operating system.
Date: February 22, 2007
Time: 2 PM EST
Register Here
A colleague of mine and I were comparing the Deloitte & Touche 2006 list of top retailers with the list of companies doing business with Novell. We counted 8 of the top 10 US retailers are using SUSE Linux… I thought that was a cool little tidbit.
Apparently, Mark Fleury, founder of JBoss, has decided it’s time to leave Red Hat – which acquired JBoss not too long ago.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2414&tag=nl.e622
I don’t think it’s a major issue, but it does raise some questions in my mind as to whether Red Hat’s roadmap for JBoss didn’t match up with Mark’s. If anyone out there knows for sure, I’d love to read your comments.
