Novell recently announced three new ZENworks Products.

1. ZENworks Orchestrator
2. ZENworks Virtual Machine Management
3. ZENworks High Performance Computing Management

Read more at Cool Solutions:

ZENworks Orchestrator
Novell ZENworks Orchestrator is the brain behind data center systems management. Orchestrator automates operations so IT tasks are done consistently and according to policy every time. As a result, you're not in fire-drill mode, working on repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. Orchestrator keeps your resources, both physical and virtual, working together and focused on your business priorities.

ZENworks Virtual Machine Management
Pick your virtual environment; VMware, Xen or Microsoft. Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management manages the entire lifecycle of your choice of virtual machines. Virtual Machine Management is critical to efficiently implementing virtualization in your data center and achieving a return on your investment.

ZENworks High Performance Computing Management
Novell ZENworks High Performance Computing (HPC) Management allows you to take advantage of idle and under-utilized computing resources anywhere in your system and put them to work. With HPC Management, you can virtualize applications and data and then distribute them to existing computing resources for processing. As a result, you get a distributed scalable computing system that acts and is managed as a single operating environment.

Identity Intelligence Series: Novell

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By Dave Kearns

Back in August, when I told you about the newest version of AdRem's free Remote Console (FreeCon) for NetWare, I also mentioned that a new version of AdRem's Server Manager product would soon be released. Well, "soon" arrived (along with Server Manager 5.0) last Friday.

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By Dave Kearns

A number of you have sent in suggestions and links to tools, utilities and software that's either designed for NetWare, works with NetWare or is simply useful on a NetWare network. Today, I want to point to a few of these in the hopes that one or more might be of interest to you.

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In a followup to The Commandments of Systems Administration Newsforge has posted the latest installment; The Fourth Commandment of Systems Administration: Thou Shalt Keep Server Logs on Everything.

The role of system administrator is a role of details. Heavily used and updated servers are filled with details, from new tables in a database to root password changes. These details need to be documented. When you are managing three servers, these details can be easy enough to remember. However, when you have 30 or 50 or 100 servers, the details become impossible to keep track of without documenting them. When it matters, you don't want to think that the IP address of that old accounting server is 192.168.10.55, you want to know it.

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Newsforge is running a series of articles called The Commandments of Systems Administration. The first three parts are available now, with hopefully more to come soon. Read on to find out more.

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By Dave Kearns

I've blown hot and cold about Novell's "Cool Solutions" over the years, although mostly about how Novell treated the amalgam of tools, tips and tidbits rather than with what the site itself was doing. Still, in the 15 years I was a volunteer helper (a.k.a., Netwire Sysop) on the various forums that first Novell marketing and later Novell support sponsored, there always did appear to be a bit of a "culture clash" with the people involved with Cool Solutions. Or maybe it was just me. Cool Solutions was started by people in Novell's GroupWise organization - and you probably know how I feel about GroupWise (I've never liked the product).

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In dealing with a lot of migration wizard problems, mostly due to the amount of time it takes to backup/restore trustees, I decided to inquire about TSA performance tweaks and recieved the following response. I havent tried any of these yet, but maybe they'll be beneficial...

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Novell often gets a poor grade when it comes to marketing, but when it comes to support, they have always done very well. Even in the early years it was apparent to Novell that they had a powerful asset; loyal subjects who used and loved their products. No small part of this loyalty came from their impressive Support Infrastructure and also from their training propaganda. This cult following so to speak was most obvious to Novell through the venue of Brainshare, and eventually through their Magazine now known as Novell Connection Magazine.

How best to leverage and strengthen such a powerful and valuable thing as what is now commonly called a community?

This is a question which Novell has tackled in an ever more aggressive way over the last few years. I believe that given the outcome, we have to give Novell a passing grade on this one, read on to find out why.

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