Amid what turned out to be a prophetic warning issued by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and the subsequent but completely unrelated federal lawsuit filed against Novell last week, the Provo, UT, firm quietly pulled NetWare into the present with an option on the future with the release of Novell Open Enterprise Server 2. Obviously there are many strange coincidences surrounding the Novell (and now Red Hat) lawsuit fil Amid what turned out to be a prophetic warning issued by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and the subsequent but completely unrelated federal lawsuit filed against Novell last week, the Provo, UT, firm quietly pulled NetWare into the present with an option on the future with the release of Novell Open Enterprise Server 2.Obviously there are many strange coincidences surrounding the Novell (and now Red Hat) lawsuit filed by IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation, some of which point to Novell as a possible accomplice in a larger Microsoft conspiracy to bring down Red Hat specifically and Linux in general. I doubt seriously that Novell’s relationship with Microsoft has these aims in mind. Quite the contrary, the company’s seemingly unholy alliance with Microsoft aims at self preservation. Novell is behaving just as anyone would when faced with potential demise — do whatever it takes to continue, to survive. Yes, corporations are nothing other than living organisms that want more than anything to persevere.And that’s just what Novell has done with Open Enterprise Server (OES) 2. This release doesn’t make the company’s SUSE Linux substantially better; it makes NetWare better. With this release of OES, the NetWare kernel (NetWare 6.5 SP7) still exists as a discrete entity, but now it runs within OES on top of the Xen hypervisor. Actually you can run NetWare 6.5 SP7 on either a physical machine or in a virtual machine, employing Xen virtualization. Either way, it’s basically the same network services OS (NetWare) running in a paravirtualized environment, where it recognizes when it’s running in one environment or the other. This is a huge deal for the plethora of Novell shops out there with intractable NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) and nervous programmers, who are well versed in NLMs but looking for a way to put their know-how to work in an environment with a future. With OES 2, Novell intends to help its customers preserve their NetWare-centric skills and run NetWare-dependent applications, all while gradually migrating to Linux. Actually, with Novell’s paravirtualization approach, you’ll still need to plunk down 5 percent “new” code to get your old NLMs to run in OES 2. Still, that’s a small price to pay for future-proofing a substantial investment in NetWare. Interestingly, according to Novell’s Jeff Jaffe, this paravirtualization allows chip manufacturers, system builders, and application writers to build these islands in the sky that perform as well as or better than traditionally virtualized counterparts. By allowing portions of the guest operating system and application to be modified to exploit the new hardware, paravirtualization allows much higher performance than previous approaches. As hardware and software manufacturers collaborate on advancing hypervisors and with both Novell and Red Hat substantially backing and employing the Xen hypervisor project, it’s easy to envision this approach stretching the lifespan of many OSes and the applications built to run on those OSes — not just NetWare. Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future we’ll see OES or Red Hat Enterprise Linux running a paravirtualized rendition of Windows Server 2008 as a means of preserving knowledge invested in legacy .Net applications. Perhaps this thought was weighing on Mr. Ballmer’s mind when he issued his foretelling warning last week. Open Source