Whither Bill? The rest of the story

[James Taylor]

Sounds like a very viable plan.
I don't know what your migration schedule is, but I have a couple of sites running clustered OES2SP1, and they have been running quite well.
SP2 just went into closed beta, so it will be several months before it is available.
-jt
 
 

James Taylor
The East Cobb Group, Inc.
678-697-9420
james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com
http://www.eastcobbgroup.com




>>> Bill Brush <bbrush at gmail.com> 4/23/2009 05:41 PM >>> 
Since my question touched off a minor (and somewhat cathartic) threadnought,
I thought I'd start a new one to give the rest of the story.

We had our strategic direction meeting yesterday and with many thanks to
this group and the discussion in the "Whither Novell?" thread I was able to
enter into it with a clear understanding of my own mind.

I think the expectation among my peers was that we were going to spend our
time discussing staying on Netware vs. moving to Windows.  I surprised them
and seized the advantage by coming out immediately with an acknowledgment
that Netware is not a viable long term solution and it will be better for us
to plot our course now when it's not an emergency rather than wait until we
hit the reefs.  So I changed the parameters of the discussion from "Netware
vs. Windows" to "OES-L vs. Windows vs. 3rd option."  I don't think they were
quite ready for that and it allowed me to work from a position of strength
even though I'm just one old codger.  Age and treachery and all that.  :-)

Anyway I was able to get them to agree that the path of least resistance and
least work would be to start adding in Linux nodes to the cluster, then
dropping out the Netware nodes.  For hardware cost savings it is desirable
to have the Linux nodes be virtualized (VMware Virtual Infrastructure, soon
to be Vsphere)  but I have to investigate whether a mixed physical/virtual
cluster is even supportable, not to mention a fully virtual cluster.  I
don't necessarily like the idea of the added complexity of a cluster on top
of virtual hardware, but virtualizing has other benefits so I'm willing to
go that route.

We still have concerns about Novell's viability since they seem to be
floundering from a strategic standpoint, but we've been flying solo for the
last several years so it's nothing new. I hope they can change that because
I'm tired fo the perpetual SNAFU that has been symptomatic of Novell's
customer relationship for the last decade.

So anyway, I'll be adding some OES2 SP(x) nodes to my cluster. My intention
is to hold off until sp2 is out of beta and do testing between now and then
on sp1.

Anyone have some sage advice about this whole plan?

Bill
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