Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1620044120100916

by e1ven • 16 years ago

47 34 16 years ago

bl4k• 16 years ago

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.

hga2• 16 years ago

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.

munchhausen5• 16 years ago

> 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).

munchhausen5• 16 years ago

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.

fname3• 16 years ago

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.

munchhausen5• 16 years ago

I didn't know that vSphere used a SuSE kernel - that's interesting. I assumed they roll their own for sure.

There must be more to it though - a couple of hundred million dollars for a Linux kernel which you can have for free anyway would be a steep price, even if we consider it as a talent acquisition to get the engineering team which built that kernel.

sangaya• 16 years ago

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.

rualthan2• 16 years ago

This is my first comment here. Oh Boy! how easy and fast it was to sign up!!

I sign just to comment because the comment "(VSphere, 4i) are built on top of the SuSE Linux kernel" is so wrong. The Classic ESX has Service Console is is customized RHEL. ESXi does not have the Service Console. It still does have a command console where one can run ESX commands and a limited set of Unix commands which AFAIK are Busybox's. It also has dropbear sshd.

So coming back to the topic, I too have no idea what VMware is going to do with SuSe Linux.

barrkel• 16 years ago

I would guess it's a move in the EC2 / etc. direction, integrating the next layer up in virtualization.

mcantelon• 16 years ago

Maybe they are planning on entering the cloud hosting market with an OS, with some nice SaS included, that can either be hosted on their cloud or an internally hosted cloud? Their purchases of Zimbra, SpringSource, Gemstone, Dunes, TriCipher, Itegrien and hiring of the main Redis developer seem to indicate they are concocting something interesting.

GBond• 16 years ago

Cloud development platform.

The acquisition of SpringSource was the the first step towards this. They catered towards the Java/Spring/hibernate enterprise developers. The SuSE branding and kernel will be used to bolster cloud development (internal & external clouds) for the LAMP crowd.

jhammerb• 16 years ago

Independence from Red Hat, since Red Hat sees VMware as their biggest competitor: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/199870/red_hat...

larrycatinspace• 16 years ago

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

munchhausen5• 16 years ago

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".

nailer3• 16 years ago

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

c00p3r4• 16 years ago

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?

cdavid2• 16 years ago

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.

c00p3r4• 16 years ago

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.

nodata• 16 years ago

Oh come on. ESX isn't the shining example you make it out to be, true KVM doesn't have as nice snapshots as ESX, but ESX has snapshots that are implemented very poorly - a never-ending delta that grows and grows and grows and takes performance with it eventually too. How many times have I lose a VM while cleaning up snapshots? Not enough to count on more than one hand, but that's still too many times.

zandorg• 16 years ago

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).

hugh4life• 16 years ago

Who gets mono?

nailer3• 16 years ago

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.

Vmware (A division of EMC) to buy Suse Linux from Novell

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