News broke yesterday that Attachmate was buying up Novell. “Who cares?” was my original thought. Linux admins are very wary of Novell so SLES does not have the usage of RHEL (corporate) or CentOS (hosting). As for XenWorks … hmm.
But, Virtualization.Info posted an article that made me pay attention. Here’s the highlights: Novell own Platespin and they make a really good virtualisation assessment tool. Microsoft’s MAP is OK (currently 5.5 release) but the data it produces is a bit basic and hidden away for my liking. Averages are misleading. Standard deviations are more useful. I’ve found the Platespin reports to be quite useful for host sizing.
And it appears that Novell has done quite a lot of work on cloud and workflow automation across multiple hypervisors. I didn’t know that. The original article mentions trouble with Opalis. I’m yet to see a good MS explanation on it.
But here’s the really interesting bit … Microsoft might be able to get its hands on some of the assets. Check the original article for more details. This could really add some clout to the MS offering.