The Friday keynote is always the most technical of the keynotes, with product demonstrations being the rule. This one was no different. One Novell product was demoed as well as several OSS products.
The Novell product was their Virtualization Services. This is an interesting product that does server virtualization, but in a way we haven't seen on commodity x86 hardware. They claim to have gotten around some of the resource hits that Virtualization causes to make running things this way actually attractive; we'll see about that when we get our hands on it.
The impressive thing about this offering is that it can offer clusters in a way we haven't seen before. We've seen virtual servers before in clusters, they're just an impersonation of a server by an existing server. This new service takes it to the next step by creating a full blown server (SuSE and NetWare-kernel were demoed).
Planned failovers happen by saving the state of the machine (think Hibernation mode) and transferring it and the storage associated with that Virtual server to another physical platform and starting it there. This has the added benefit of preserving the state of the TCP stack, so clients don't have to reconnect (presuming their watchdog settings are long enough to pass over the service interruption). This is very nice.
On the Open Source Software front, Novell demoed Mono and a lot of what it can do. One thing that I hadn't been aware of is that you can take .NET compiled binaries, and execute them with Mono on both Linux and PPC. Whoa. Didn't know that. The new Mono will shortly have full support for windows forms, which was what was demoed today. Expected release in Q2 of '05.
They also did a demo of how Hula works with non-Hula clients. When sending calendar invites to other people, it sends a message with 'accept' and 'decline' links in the mail. The recipient then clicks whichever, and Hula marks that person as accepted/declined as appropriate. Nifty stuff, that. They also demoed a Mac client pulling down the ICS for a user and importing it into that local calendar.
The Novell product was their Virtualization Services. This is an interesting product that does server virtualization, but in a way we haven't seen on commodity x86 hardware. They claim to have gotten around some of the resource hits that Virtualization causes to make running things this way actually attractive; we'll see about that when we get our hands on it.
The impressive thing about this offering is that it can offer clusters in a way we haven't seen before. We've seen virtual servers before in clusters, they're just an impersonation of a server by an existing server. This new service takes it to the next step by creating a full blown server (SuSE and NetWare-kernel were demoed).
Planned failovers happen by saving the state of the machine (think Hibernation mode) and transferring it and the storage associated with that Virtual server to another physical platform and starting it there. This has the added benefit of preserving the state of the TCP stack, so clients don't have to reconnect (presuming their watchdog settings are long enough to pass over the service interruption). This is very nice.
On the Open Source Software front, Novell demoed Mono and a lot of what it can do. One thing that I hadn't been aware of is that you can take .NET compiled binaries, and execute them with Mono on both Linux and PPC. Whoa. Didn't know that. The new Mono will shortly have full support for windows forms, which was what was demoed today. Expected release in Q2 of '05.
They also did a demo of how Hula works with non-Hula clients. When sending calendar invites to other people, it sends a message with 'accept' and 'decline' links in the mail. The recipient then clicks whichever, and Hula marks that person as accepted/declined as appropriate. Nifty stuff, that. They also demoed a Mac client pulling down the ICS for a user and importing it into that local calendar.