Wednesday, November 09, 2005
An interesting theory on the future of NetWare
I came across an interesting theory of what the future of NetWare could look like. What if NW7 or NW7.1 were designed to run in a Xen virtual-machine on SLES?
What the heck? I hear you say?
There is a good reason for doing so. By running in a VM you greatly reduce the number of drivers you have to have to run NetWare. Or more directly, if Novell provides the drivers for the VM interfaces, the rest of us won't have to worry about when Adaptec will stop producing .HAM drivers, or Dell will stop producing PERC drivers.
It is an interesting concept, and a way to support NetWare in a world where vendors stop providing Netware drivers. This is key for some systems that even today still have NetWare dependancies and their replacements are either too expensive or don't quite meet the business need.
I do have qualms about the idea since it by definition requires a different operating system to run NetWare. Unlike DOS, this different operating system is still accessible when NetWare is running. Patching of said might provide for increased downtimes. As you can imagine, I'm still a little dubious on the topic of virtual machines in general.
What the heck? I hear you say?
There is a good reason for doing so. By running in a VM you greatly reduce the number of drivers you have to have to run NetWare. Or more directly, if Novell provides the drivers for the VM interfaces, the rest of us won't have to worry about when Adaptec will stop producing .HAM drivers, or Dell will stop producing PERC drivers.
It is an interesting concept, and a way to support NetWare in a world where vendors stop providing Netware drivers. This is key for some systems that even today still have NetWare dependancies and their replacements are either too expensive or don't quite meet the business need.
I do have qualms about the idea since it by definition requires a different operating system to run NetWare. Unlike DOS, this different operating system is still accessible when NetWare is running. Patching of said might provide for increased downtimes. As you can imagine, I'm still a little dubious on the topic of virtual machines in general.
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 9:47 AM
