openSUSE

How to Add Additional Perl Modules to Your Linux Installation

smflood — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:18:26 -0700

Depending on whether you're using openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Open Enterprise Server and which version you're using you may be lucky and find that you can easily add the required Perl module via YaST.

Here packages are named perl-<module> where double colons (::) are replaced by a minus (-) so for example the Net::SNMP module can be added by installing the perl-Net-SNMP package.

However the majority of Perl modules are not available through YaST so have to be added another way. Fortunately Perl on Linux provides a way of automating the manual process.

As root run

# perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'

If it's the first time this has been done you need to answer some questions - you can either choose to autoconfigure these or run through manually and choose defaults. If you get prompted for a CPAN mirror URL use something suitable from http://search.cpan.org/mirror

Once done you can then install the additional modules - case is important!

For example, to install the Net::SMTP module do

cpan[#]> install Net::SMTP

at the end of which, if this is the first time using the shell, it will probably note that there's a newer CPAN so then

cpan[#]> install CPAN

which may take a while!

Afterwards it will prompt you to reload CPAN so

cpan[#]> reload CPAN

To exit

cpan[#]> quit

openSUSE

Create Custom Geekos with the Geeko Builder

ssalgy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Now that SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is out the door, we wanted to make it easy for SUSE enthusiasts to spread the word. Over the years, we've had tons of requests for personalized Geekos, so we've whipped up Geekobuilder.com to let SUSE and openSUSE enthusiasts show their love of the Geeko.

Geekobuilder.com is an interactive Web site that gives SUSE Linux enthusiasts the power to create their very own customized Geeko artwork, and win some fun prizes as well! The top five Geekos submitted by June 30th will net the artist an HD flip video camera, customized with our favorite green mascot.

Geeko fans can use Geekobuilder.com to create personalized Geekos for their desktop, or to share with other Linux lovers all over the world.

The site is live, now it's up to us to spread the word. Take a few minutes today to share Geekobuilder.com with your friends in the Linux community using the “Share this Site” feature. Tweet it, Digg it, email it, blog about it, and slap it on your Facebook wall so everybody can have a lot of fun building their own Geeko at www.Geekobuilder.com.

Data Center Specialists

Field Memo: PlateSpin Orchestrate Success Story - Tenzing

rossatnovell — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:48:06 -0600

By using PlateSpin® Orchestrate to manage both Microsoft Windows and Linux environments, Tenzing has created a new cloud computing platform for a new market of customers.
About Tenzing

Tenzing is a managed hosting company with an award-winning approach to hosting business-critical Internet applications. A private company with 60+ employees, Tenzing has customer service centers in Kelowna, BC and Toronto, Ontario and datacenters in Canada's primary NAPs: 151 Front, Toronto and the Harbour Centre, Vancouver.
Challenge

As a managed hosting company, Tenzing manages the complex business requirements of hundreds of different clients. To provide efficient services and support, the company needs to make the best use of its data center resources. Automating workload management across physical and virtual machines would not only increase efficiency and improve performance, but also reduce costs for both Tenzing and its customers.

Many of Tenzing's clients have both Microsoft Windows and Linux environments and require virtualization technologies that work seamlessly on both platforms. Tenzing needed a single data center management solution that was flexible enough to natively manage all industry-leading hypervisors, including VMware, Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Novell Solution

Tenzing evaluated several workload management solutions including VMware and Citrix, before selecting PlateSpin Orchestrate from Novell to power its new cloud computing platform.

"We needed a workload management solution that is hypervisor agnostic," said Kelly Beardmore, CTO at Tenzing. "PlateSpin Orchestrate is the only solution we evaluated that does not lock us in to a single virtualization technology, giving us the maximum flexibility to meet the individual needs our diverse customer base. We also found that PlateSpin Orchestrate was very extensible and easy to customize."

Using PlateSpin Orchestrate, Tenzing can manage client workloads efficiently across physical and virtual machines. The company can effectively leverage all hypervisor technologies, regardless of vendor, and manage everything from a central, unified interface. With a centralized view of its data center, Tenzing can create policies specific to a customer's business environment. For example, if a customer has a significant outage, policies automatically direct the workload to another machine, with no user disruption.

"We need a flexible policy engine and the ability to set high-level policies for our clients, regardless of the technology underneath," said Beardmore. "PlateSpin Orchestrate is the brain of our data center and allows us to manage workloads effectively so that everything works in concert. We can tailor policies for hundreds of customers."

PlateSpin Orchestrate offers high levels of automation, allowing Tenzing to quickly provision new servers using images and predefined templates. Such automation has dramatically improved speed of delivery - the company can now deliver solutions to customers in 15 minutes, a process that used to take up to 24 hours. PlateSpin Orchestrate will also automate the way customers place orders as they will be able to elastically scale their network, storage, and processing resources on-demand through a Web-based portal.

"With PlateSpin Orchestrate, we do the initial install of the operating system and application framework for our customers, then they configure it and we template it," said Beardmore. "If there is a problem, we have the template ready which greatly reduces our support costs."

PlateSpin Orchestrate provides Tenzing with the flexibility to balance the right amount of computing resources for each customer. Such flexibility also allows the company to prevent any business disruption in the event of a workload failure. Customers can be confident that they can scale workloads on demand in both their Windows and Linux environments.

"With PlateSpin Orchestrate, we've been able to bring a cloud computing platform to the market, which is an important place to be right now," said Beardmore, "We can be much more flexible than our competitors with the ability to provide native support for Windows and Linux, using any hypervisor technology."
Results

PlateSpin Orchestrate gives Tenzing a single workload management tool to natively manage Windows, Linux and VMware environments, enabling the company to create a cloud computing platform to reach a new market. The flexibility of the solution allows the company to effectively support the individual needs of its diverse customer base.

Automation has dramatically improved data center efficiency, while reducing man hours by 50 percent. The company can now deliver services to its customers 95 percent faster. Greater efficiency has also reduced capital expenditures per customer deployment by 20 percent, and support costs by 25 percent. With flexible, monthly licensing agreements from Novell, the company can pass along savings to its customers with cost-effective options.

"Without Novell, we would be tied to specific technologies—whether Microsoft, Xen, or VMware—and would be forced to manage each environment separately," said Beardmore. "PlateSpin Orchestrate gives us a major competitive advantage as we can provide customers with a much more flexible offering as there is no need to require customers to use one solution over another."

PlateSpin Recon: Workload Analysis Flyer and Presentation

rossatnovell — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:37:31 -0600

PlateSpin Recon is the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management. This assists customers by giving them an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure.

PlateSpin Recon: Workload Profiling, Analysis and Planning Product Flyer
Successful data center initiatives require considerable up-front planning and analysis to ensure a maximum return on investment. PlateSpin® Recon is a sophisticated workload profiling, analysis and planning solution that provides new levels of intelligence, visual analysis and forecasting for optimizing the data center.

Get the Flyer in English, in All languages.

PlateSpin Recon Partner Presentation
Successful virtualization initiatives require considerable up-front planning to ensure maximum ROI. But it doesn’t end there. Because resource utilization changes over time, regular reassessment and management are required to maintain optimal efficiency. PlateSpin® Recon from Novell® is a sophisticated workload analysis, planning and management solution that provides new levels of intelligence, visual analysis and forecasting for optimizing the data center.

Get the Presentation in English.

Enjoy,

The Data Center Enablement Team

Cool Blogs: Official Novell Bloggers

PlateSpin Recon 3.6 Released

rossatnovell — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:02:21 -0600

WALTHAM, Mass. 29 Apr 2009

First server workload profiling, analysis and planning solution to give customers ongoing visibility into their virtual infrastructure

Novell today announced the availability of PlateSpin® Recon 3.6 , the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management to give customers an ongoing view of their physical and virtual infrastructure.

As customers embrace virtualization in the data center, they need comprehensive information about their physical and virtual server workloads, collected over time, to give a true picture of how resources are being used. PlateSpin Recon 3.6 allows data center managers to gain new insight into their virtual infrastructure, not only to better plan the initial virtualization initiative, but also to maximize the return on their virtualization investment and avoid or postpone costly hardware purchases over time.

Designed to take the guesswork out of complex server consolidation and capacity planning initiatives, PlateSpin Recon 3.6 offers best-fit scenario modeling that increases server consolidation ratios while simultaneously minimizing resource contention. Post-consolidation, PlateSpin Recon continues to track and analyze key resource utilization metrics as workloads change over time, so customers can re-assess and re-optimize their virtual infrastructures, increase workload performance, and reclaim and redeploy underutilized resources.

“Virtualization initiatives cannot be successful without a thorough understanding of the server workloads running in the data center,” said Richard Whitehead, director of product marketing for data center solutions at Novell. “To ensure a maximum return on investment, successful data center initiatives require upfront planning and analysis. PlateSpin Recon 3.6 not only helps with the upfront planning, but is versatile enough to continue to track important utilization metrics over time, ensuring ongoing efficiency, productivity and return on investment.”

PlateSpin Recon remotely discovers hardware and software inventory across the data center, on the industry’s broadest range of operating systems, virtualization platforms and hardware. By examining resource utilization – CPU, disk, memory and network – for each workload over time, it ensures the optimal fit between real workload requirements and available or planned resources. PlateSpin Recon matches utilization peaks and valleys across workloads to fit more workloads onto each virtual host, optimizing resource utilization. It also identifies gaps between virtual resource allocation and actual usage: minimizing these gaps maximizes the virtual resource capacity of existing IT infrastructure, extending useful service life and postponing new hardware purchases.

PlateSpin Recon provides powerful virtual infrastructure management features to help organizations monitor and manage the growth of virtual machines, avoid virtual infrastructure sprawl and automate IT chargeback for physical and virtual resources. New features in Version 3.6 include:

Resource reclamation reports that offer customers graphical proof points to show resource consumption and reclaimable resources;
The ability to include virtual clusters in virtual infrastructure reports;
Support for SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 11;
Solaris Containers support, allowing customers to plan migrations of Solaris workloads to Solaris Containers;
A new licensing model offering less expensive ongoing analysis of both physical and virtual data center infrastructures.

“We have always recommended PlateSpin Recon to our customers as the best solution for consolidation planning. Its intelligent algorithms consistently give higher consolidation ratios than other products, putting more VMs on each virtual host, meaning less hardware and licenses to buy and lowering the initial capital expense.” said Damon Brown, CTO, Govplace.“The new virtual capacity management features make it a simple decision to keep using PlateSpin Recon after the initial consolidation exercise. As workloads in the data center evolve over time, increasing or decreasing resource utilization, PlateSpin Recon helps manage and balance these changing needs with the available resources. Even when the virtualization platform shows maximum resource allocation, PlateSpin Recon identifies underutilized resources to be reclaimed and reassigned.”

PlateSpin Recon, along with the other products in the PlateSpin workload management family – PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Orchestrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Forge – enables customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. PlateSpin Workload Management from Novell is the only solution on the market today to support 32-and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with integrated Xen.

Availability
PlateSpin Recon 3.6 is available immediately. For more information about this announcement, see http://www.platespin.com/products/recon.

About Novell
Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers the best engineered, most interoperable Linux platform and a portfolio of integrated IT management software that helps customers around the world reduce cost, complexity and risk. With our infrastructure software and ecosystem of partnerships, Novell harmoniously integrates mixed IT environments, allowing people and technology to work as one. For more information, visit www.novell.com.

Novell and PlateSpin are registered trademarks and Workload Portability is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts

Ian Bruce
Novell, Inc.
Телефон: +1 781 464-8034
Email: ibruce@novell.com

openSUSE

Field Memo: What's New in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

rossatnovell — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:50:05 -0600

What's New in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

SUSE® Linux Enterprise 11 from Novell delivers interoperability and mission-critical support for the complete computing environment, to help you reduce cost, complexity and risk. This version delivers significant advances and has been especially designed for:

• Interoperability—The most interoperable Linux turns boundaries into bridges to help make your IT work as one. You can increase Linux interoperability with Windows and UNIX to simplify your environment and better leverage your existing investments.
• Mission-critical computing—The Linux built for mission-critical computing delivers the power and reliability you need to migrate from UNIX and build a resilient infrastructure. Powerful high availability clustering provides enterprise reliability with the affordability of open source.
• Ubiquity—SUSE Linux Enterprise powers your complete environment. You can run the desktop to data center platform built on a common code base. Deploy physical and virtual servers with the greatest of ease and outstanding performance, and run key applications from the leading ISVs.

Get the White Paper here.

Enjoy,

The Data Center Enablement Team

SUSE Linux Enterprise Cool Solutions

Field Memo: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Technical White Paper

rossatnovell — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:58:37 -0600

Each year several hundred thousand RISC/UNIX platforms are migrated to Linux, Windows, another UNIX system or a different platform. More than 80 percent of the migrated systems are moved to Linux or Windows with most of the remainder moving to another RISC/UNIX platform.

For the past 15 years and longer, RISC/UNIX* platforms, such as AIX* on POWER*, HP-UX* on PA-RISC and Solaris* on SPARC*, have established a history of solid reliability in the data center. RISC/UNIX typically runs mission-critical applications, including back-end databases, and has a reputation for good performance, high reliability, proven scalability and trustworthy security. But these benefits come at a high total cost of ownership (TCO). RISC/UNIX generally requires
expensive proprietary software and hardware as well as budget-draining annual maintenance costs. These expenses are a key factor in recent, widespread migrations to other platforms, specifically Linux*.

Get the White Paper here.

Enjoy,

The Data Center Enablement Team

SUSE Linux Enterprise Cool Solutions

Novell Support Advisor 1.0 -- Now Available!!!

kgroneman — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:43:11 -0600

Novell Technical Services is pleased to announce the availability of the Novell Support Advisor 1.0. As you may know, the general 1.0 release was made available effective 20 March 2009. This version consists of a client that runs on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (or later), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (or later), OpenSUSE 10.3 (or later), Microsoft Windows XP SP2 (or later), Microsoft Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. The supported target servers include currently supported versions of SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Open Enterprise Server® (Linux). To learn more about Novell Support Advisor, and to download the current version, visit Novell Support Advisor.

What is Novell Support Advisor?
Novell Support Advisor is an automated self-help tool used to support and diagnose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Open Enterprise Server (Linux) and associated products. This tool provides you with a streamlined way to perform both pro-active and reactive system diagnostic tasks typically provided by Novell Technical Services, but in a local, secure and automated fashion.

Novell Support Advisor Vision
The vision for Novell Support Advisor is to provide improved product value by placing automated system and product diagnostic capabilities in the hands of our customers. In doing this, Novell Technical Services aims to improve overall product support automation while resolving and deflecting our most common and critical support related issues. By providing this tool to our customers, Novell Technical Services can better determine current and potential user value and can solicit feedback from the user community to assist in driving new features and functionality.

Feedback Appreciated
New functionality for Novell Support Advisor will be driven in large part by feedback from the user community. We appreciate and rely heavily upon the input, involvement and support from our customers in driving future functionality of this tool. Come to the Novell Support Advistor Forum and give us your input.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Cool Solutions

Linux Sets You Free

kgroneman — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:34:27 -0600

Linux Sets You Free: http://www.youtube.com/novell

Cool Solutions

What do you do with Linux?

kgroneman — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:45:06 -0600

What do you do with Linux? You get cash. Cold, hard cash. US$2000.00 to be exact. **OR** you get an HP Mini 2140 **OR** you get a Flip Mino video camera.

And it's easy. Very easy. Go to http://www.howdoyoulinux.com for details.

Have you got some video skills? Ok...maybe, or maybe not, but do you have a video camera? Do you speak English? Good. You're in. Go to the above link and get details of how to enter the contest by posting your 1 minute video on YouTube. Trust me on this one....your chances of winning are significantly increased if you actually enter the contest........

Chameleon - NUI Israel