I learned lots of cool stuff last week while I was out in Provo, Utah, at Novell’s ATT Live sessions. There was simply not enough time to attend all the class sessions I wanted (in the 4 days I was there), but I’m getting through all the slide presentations and labs for the ones I missed. Phew!
Now, of course, you are not me. Your list of things you find cool certainly will not match mine, but I thought I’d throw together a short list of 5 diverse things I learned that I’m allowed to publicly reveal:
- PolicyKit is an awesome way to delegate ownership of Xen virtual machines (as well as many other dbus style applications). This is a fairly-new package that is helping us to punch our way out of the wet paperbag that is posix. Look into it!
- The SLES11 cluster stack is very nice, and is waaaay different than the traditional Linux and SLES10 heartbeat-only method. It will be called the “High Availability Extension” and will include LinuxHA OpenAIS (Update: See comment/reply below by Beekhof), cLVM, OCFS2, DRBD, and IPVS. It will be an add-on pack (I believe they will be called Enterprise Extensions) in some fashion, with specific up-sold support (though the download will apparently still be free).
- As of SLES11, OCFS2 is truly posix-accurate. This means you could use it as a standard user-style filesystem if you wanted to… Fun!
- The mountains in SLC and Provo are absolutely beautiful, but still catch me off-guard. In Michigan, if you are standing outside, and you look over to your right and see something *that* big next to you, you need to run.
- The Mooty toolset is very cool. Mooty is a suite of tools developed by the Novell training team for rapid manipulation of their training machines. Let your imagination go wild with that one. It is clever, fast, easy. I understand they are going to turn it out into the open source as a project someday soon. I’m on the list so I’ll let you know when it happens.
There are so many more cool things, like Domain Services For Windows (Active eDirectory?), all the new developments in ZenWorks 10, the Platespin stuff, and on and on…
Thanks to everyone at Novell for the wonderful time. And thanks to all the fellow participants for the great company and conversation.
🙂
Actually the LinuxHA piece (which did the messaging and membership in SLE10) has been replaced with OpenAIS which implements the AIS industry standard for clustering that is also being used by Red Hat and Oracle.
@Beekhof:
Thank you for the clarification!
Has the SLES11 High Availability Extension been released yet? Can’t seem to get any answers out of the Novell website, wonder of wonders. 😉
@Karl
I found this article a while back:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/24/novell_suse_linux_11/print.html
…that most notably contains this quote: “The HA Extension high availability clustering software for SLES 11 will not be available until sometime during the second quarter of this year.”
…now ve vait…
😉
@ Karl
Looks like it was released last week sometime (third week of May), I must have missed it. Nonetheless, I’ve downloaded it and set up an instance of a cluster in my lab. looks like OCFS2 is going to be my preferred back-end, and I’m still kicking around the console and getting used to the quorum startup options in a two-node cluster, and “stopping” or “freezing” the cluster when a quorum is lost… looks like a future post will be in the works…
Jeremy, has Mooty toolset been released yet? looks like something I want to play with
@ Trace
No, still nothing public as far as I am aware. However, perhaps the best part of the toolset is that it is based on things that already exist and are available to anyone. It’s just that they had not previously been arranged and configured into such a convenient bundle. Maybe someday I’ll elaborate… seems like a good future post topic…
😉