blartfast's blog

This is the start of a series of blogs that examines how to show management the value of ZENworks to ensure that it and your skill set are not replaced by another solution

Ever tried deploying 1,000 computers before it's time to leave the office for the day?

During my college days you always had to be careful when using materials, which came from an external source, in any course work. Forget to include these in the References section of your paper and you would be marked down; worse case could be an accusation of plagiarism. This memory of college was recently triggered by a PR release from another company who is active in the virtualization market.

To see why take a look at this photo taken on 25th November 2007 of the Novell booth at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. Apologies for the size but you need to see the messages on booth wall.

During the event we spoke to many people who wanted to know more about our virtualization solutions for data center automation which ZENworks Orchestrator Server ( ZOS ) provides.

For those who haven't come across ZOS before, here's a scenario to illustrate what it can do for you. It's end of quarter. The finance servers are busy crunching their way through the numbers to produce reports showing how well the company has been performing. Naturally, management wants these are soon as possible; sales definitively does as commission payments are also being calculated. ZOS moves virtual machines around physical hosts so that those associated with the finance system has access to more resources, speeding up processing. ZOS could also have taken the action of creating a new VM from the master library, then provisioned it with the finance application and brought into play on the most appropriate host hardware. It all depends on the rules that you describe to ZOS which are based on how you operate your data centre.

ZOS works wth VMware, Xen and the soon to be release Microsoft offering, HyperX. Read more on ZOS here.

We summarize the functionality of ZOS using an equation type notation in the form of Optimization = Virtualization + Automation

Now getting back to my college memory, the other company used Virtualization + Automation = Optimization as slogan in the press release. It's always nice to be referenced like this; its quite flattering.

But an acknowledgment would be nice...

Martin Buckley, a.k.a the Evil Zen Scientist, rightly pointed out that I'd posted my first coolblog without introducing myself.

Let me put right this breach of etiquette with my 2nd post

I'll avoid listing interests, hobbies and pets although if anyone has any advice on how to stop one of my cats bringing live frogs into the house , I'd appreciate it.

My involvement with Novell started off as an user, all the way back to Netware 3.11 and a bit of v2.2. This moved onto a consultancy role for a medical software company who used Netware 3.12 for its traditional role providing file and print services, but also hosted a virtualized operating system known as BOS.

That's right. Virtual OS on Netware 3.12 back in the mid 90s.

As time progressed I moved onto various positions, including working with EZS experiencing the delights of SFT III running on multiple CPU servers. Most of the latter part of my career has been involved with service desks and systems management before joining Novell in July of this year in the SRM division.

Well that's me.

One question for the audience. Who can recall the different colours used by the Netware snake screen saver when running on multiple CPUs? The first was red, but for the life of me I can't recall what the others were for a 4 CPU server.

If we look at identity as being a number of characteristics that combine to provide definition to a person or entity, then both users and computers qualify. A computer will have operating system with one or more from anti-virus / spyware, firewall, management etc.. Together these become an identity. User identity is somewhat more obvious taking form from user name, group membership, LDAP details, required business applications etc..

How does this apply to system management? Read the definitions again and it becomes apparent that both are necessary in order to be truly effective. Computers need to have the correct identity to execute business applications and the user identity should provide which are required.

Many systems management solutions focus exclusively on the computer identity without paying attention to the user. They distribute an application out into the estate and hope that it is there when the user needs it. Would it not make more sense to for the systems management solution to provide identity management for the computer and the user?

ZCM allows exactly this. It is possible to define computer identity in terms of the operating system, anti-virus, vulnerability management etc.. Individual or groups of computers can have various identities depending on business function. For example, you may not want a server to be defined in the same way that a desktop would be.

User identity is taken care of by leveraging information held in a LDAP directory such as our own eDirectory or Active Directory from Microsoft. Typically this would use information like user group or department membership to which applications are then associated.

Using both sets of identities, ZCM will now make sure that computers are correctly configured but also that the installed applications match what is in the user identity. This is what makes ZCM unique in the system management solution market today, helping I.T departments align themselves with demands from the business.