Top posting the quote the below is talking about. No other edits.

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From Page 5 of http://www.moreinterop.com/tca-roadmap.pdf that got so disparaged on this list.

Novell Data Center Management Solutions The "brain" of Novell data center management is Novell ZENworks(r) Orchestrator. It allows for policy-based automation across heterogeneous environments. ZENworks Orchestrator takes a heuristic approach, continually learning from previous events and resource demands. Virtual machine management is critical to efficiently implementing virtualization in the data center and achieving a solid return on investment. Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management provides the following heterogeneous virtual machine management capabilities: • Provides lifecycle management of VMware*, Xen and Microsoft virtual machines • Discovers servers for virtual machine commissioning • Discovers offline and online virtual machines • Provides deployment, redeployment and rollback of virtual machines • Manages physical, virtual and storage compute nodes • Features cluster-aware virtualization • Includes policy-based dynamic workload deployment << On 3/15/07, Greg Freemyer wrote:

On 3/15/07, John Andersen wrote:

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On Wednesday 14 March 2007, Kai Ponte wrote:

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This particulary when compared to a series of $20K servers that can also run some form of virtualization for lesser-demand apps.

20K?

Try 1/10th of that.

I'm running a low end Dell Poweredge server at my office that does all the file/print/mail management tasks you would expect of Suse for a network of 20 users. And it runs windows virtual machine in a complete sandbox with one port nat-ed to the wooly interenet with Vmware Server.

The windows machine is to demo software to customers. Its rock solid.

I didn't pay anywhere near 20k.

I suspect Kai is talking about a dynamic data-center concept.

You need to have all of your virtual server images stored on a shared storage (typically SAN -based) with access from all the managed real servers. That class of solution is definitely in the $20K+ range at this point at least from HP. (That includes SAN arrays, FC switches, Blade Enclosures, and the Blade servers)

Then you need a virtual server manager that will deploy the virtual server images on demand to the physical servers that have unallocated resources.

You know, the kind of thing Novell / MS just announced under their contract of 6 months ago. (ducking and covering).

Seriously, I was surprised that nobody commented on that announcement on this list. It definitely the sort of thing that is targeted at data center environments and its great it my mind to see Novell participating in the development.

It just was not clear to me if a pure SUSE/XEN environment will be able use pure GPL management code or if you will have to buy the overall manager from MS and Novell will just be developing and GPLing the hooks to let SUSE/XEN participate.

Does anyone on this list know?

Greg -- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century

-- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org