coolguys's blog

We recently announced that ZENworks Asset Management customers with Upgrade Protection or Maintenance would be entitled to ZENworks Asset Management Services within ZENworks 10 Configuration Management.

So how will this work?

Updated: This iManager plug-in will be part of a milestone release after the release of Antelope (IDM 3.5.1).

Identity Manager users have requested UI that presents a driver's health. Access to specific driver cache statistics has been added to the 3.5.1 release of Identity Manager. The IDM administration team has developed new driver health and statistics UI in iManager that reads the driver and server and presents health information. The following describes the new UI.

Driver Health & Statistics

The driver set graphic view now includes a health semaphore on the driver icon. The semaphore represents the health of the driver as configured by the administrator. If the health thresholds are not configured for the driver, the semaphore does not display.

Clicking on the semaphore will display the health and statistics dialog.

The Driver Health and Statistics dialog shows the driver cache file and related details. The cache file size is dynamic, by default, therefore, the graph representing it's size will fluctuate depending on the percentage of space consumed by the unprocessed transactions. The dialog also includes the current semaphore light, similar to the driver icon.

The bottom section represents the detail of the driver cache file. This section includes the unprocessed transactions total and a bar graph for each transaction. These include: add, remove, modify, move, rename, resync entry, request resync, and custom.

Driver Health Configuration

The Green and Yellow states of the driver health semaphore can be configured. If the conditions of the Green light fail, the semaphore changes to the Yellow light. If the conditions of the Yellow light fail, it switches to the Red light. No conditions are set for the Red light. Therefore, an administrator can define what conditions determine when a Green or Yellow light will display. They are configured in the “Health Configuration” option in the contextual menu when clicking on the driver state icon.

Driver Health & Statistics Dashboard

Also included in the UI is a dashboard view of all the drivers in a driver set. For each driver, a Health & Statistics window is displayed. You can set the refresh to continually refresh all the windows on the page. A user can also change the display to 1, 2, 3, or 4 columns, depending upon the resolution of the user's monitor.

The idea behind this UI is to expose known driver functionality so that Identity Manager experts and administrators can start learning about how their drivers are working. Over time, this knowledge can help when troubleshooting a specific driver problem.

Any feedback or comments on this new UI is anticipated and greatly appreciated.

This post took a long time to put together - hopefully it answers a lot of questions raised on Cool Blogs. I especially want to clear up the misconceptions about ZENworks 10 Configuration Management - and some incorrect assumptions about being tied to a Windows server infrastructure.

Written at: San Francisco, CA and Draper, UT

To start we need to re-read the blog post from Jason Williams from June 2006 - in it he explains much of the rational for the drive to Open Enterprise Server 2 and the shift of services across from the NetWare kernel to the Linux kernel.

And here is the real crux of the matter; Novell has two choices in front of it:

1) Continue developing the NetWare operating system

2) Bring the services over to a new platform for the future

It is not as if Novell suddently woke up one morning and decided to port all of its services to Linux and buy Ximian and SuSE. The decision making process was long and drawn out and a good deal of customer feedback went into the decisions. And so we find ourselves in the here and now.

To this end the ZENworks team have worked closely with the Workgroup team at Novell in many ways.

First - to make sure that we both co-operate and our products work well with each other

• ZENworks 7 runs on both NetWare 6.5 and SLES 10.  We have lots of examples of customers choosing the deploy ZENworks on a mixed environment of NetWare, OES and SLES together.
• ZENworks 10 Configuration Management runs on SLES 10 and the forthcoming Open Enterprise Server 2.

Second - we have also tied our support lifecycles together where it makes sense.

• We know customers will run NetWare and ZENworks "for ever" - to that end we support ZENworks 7 suite until 2017 - longer than NetWare 6.5.
• Take a look at the support lifecycle here http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?st=-1&sl=-1&sg=1
• This means that we will have support packs, updates and security fixes during the general support period.

Third - we jointly came up with some creative product bundling

• Take a look at the Novell Open Workgroup Suite. http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/
• NOWS includes ZENworks 7 suite - which runs on NetWare 6.5 and SLES 10
• NOWS also includes an entitlement to ZENworks 10 Configuration Management which runs on SLES 10

I hope these help emphasise our strong commitment to customers who have purchased and deployed ZENworks in a NetWare environment.

Let me repeat again: we support you with ZENworks 7 during the life of your NetWare infrastructure. We welcome you with the newest additions to the ZENworks product family as you move across to Open Enterprise Server 2 and SLES 10.

The newest version of the ZENworks family was released today.

ZENworks 10 Configuration Management runs on SLES 10, Open Enterprise Server 2 and Microsoft Windows 2003 Server. It supports integration with Novell eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory. It can use either the included Sybase iAnywhere or Microsoft SQL Server. The choice is yours.

Download now from: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=tbcCrCfhFG8~

Written at: Draper, UT

ZENworks Configuration Management is available in three editions:

Standard Edition

• Configuration Management. Full Lifecycle Management of Windows workstations and Servers - including Windows Vista

Advanced Edition

• As Standard Edition - but also includes:
• ZENworks Endpoint Security Management for USB and Wifi devices
• integrated Patch Management Services

Enterprise Edition

• As standard Edition - but also includes:
• integrated ZENworks Asset Management
• integrated Patch Management Services
• ZENworks Endpoint Security Management
• ZENworks Handheld Management
• ZENworks Linux Management

Full information is at http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/configurationmanagement/

Just a quick post:

Novell today announced the expansion of its enterprise management services capabilities through the acquisition of Senforce Technologies, a leader in endpoint security management. With Senforce Technologies, Novell is extending its policy-based management offerings to include a full suite of endpoint security solutions. As part of the overall Novell® enterprise management strategy, ZENworks® Endpoint Security Management will help customers protect their IT investment from the increasing threats of data theft, wireless exploits, software attacks, malware and viruses.

You can read more about ZENworks Endpoint Security Management at http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/endpointsecuritymanagement

This means that we will now be working to integrate the ZENworks End Point Security Management capabilities with ZENworks Configuration Management - and just like ZCM make this cross platform and environment agnostic.

Written at: San Francisco, CA

I wrote a few weeks ago about working in the Superlab. I managed to get another week and some more machines. Not as many as last time - but still good fun.

I am working with my team of Product Managers on some competitive and scaling details for some white papers.Written at: Provo, UT

Today was setup day.

We're using ZENworks 10 Configuration Management running on both SLES 10 and Windows 2003 servers to test the environment. Here you see us imaging Vista and Windows XP from a SLES 10 server.

One of the pieces of the time in the Superlab is to document and show the doubters that ZCM runs on SLES 10.

Here are a couple of racks being managed from the SLES 10 server.

It's good hardware too. We're running on dual AMD Opterons - and using 64 bit OS where practical. We've got SLES 10 on x86_64 as well as 64 bit Vista in the mix. Naturally we also support Windows 2003 on x86_64 too.

I'll write more as we get through the week - but what do you want to see?Written at: Provo, UT