Work is still being done in the NetWare kernel area. Demos were being conducted in the lab, and NetWare kernel used in the Friday keynote was running in a ring 1 virtualization module on a Linux box using the XEN virtualization project.
XEN is kind of a cool project. The demo showed a few virtualized servers running on three SLES boxes, and you can move these virtualized machines around. When you tell a virtual machine to migrate, it starts by moving inactive memory pages. After it has moved what it can, the virtualized machine stops the virtual machine, moves the remaining memory pages and starts the virtual memory on the new machine. In the end, there are just few seconds during which the virtual memory isn't actually running. It's very cool. Friday's keynote statement about this says Novell's goal is to make moving a virtualized machine to a different physical machine take just a few milliseconds. (It took a couple seconds in the demo, so the streaming video app stalled for a bit.) The idea is
that XEN will show up as a preview in the SUSE Pro 9.3 release, due
out in April, and that the real thing will be in the SLES 10 release by early
next year.
Mono is still getting lots of hype, but I haven't seen much adoption since last year. Novell is busily working on completing a full port of the System.Windows.Forms set of APIs, with a goal of the Mono 1.2 release this summer. Why is this important? Well, all those .NET developers writing apps using SWF will be able to run their apps via Mono on Linux and Mac computers (assuming the application doesn't do things like use ActiveX controls).
I went to a session on SWF development. It had a demo app Novell got from the Microsoft Tereaserver site, and showed it running on Windows and Linux. It looked the same and operated the same, using the same binary file. The client side of ZEN Linux Management was written using Mono, so Novell is starting to use it internally. And yes, there is someone working on porting the Mono runtime to NetWare. Another Mono application that shows things quite well is f-spot, a photo management application.
On the Linux desktop side, some interesting things are in the works. Novell is working on writing a full NCP client for Linux. The goal of this client is to be able to let administrators use the same login scripts Windows clients use. In closed beta now, the client is expected for release this summer. This will let users gain access to their files running on a NetWare 5.x or 6.x server over the IP protocol. No IPX support is planned.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
