On the third anniversary of the 2006 Microsoft-Novell pact, Novell is touting 475 customers who have bought SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates from Microsoft under the settlement. Under the controversial agreement, Novell agreed to give Microsoft either a percentage of all its Linux revenue through 2011 or a minimum of $40 million. Microsoft, in turn, bought $240 million in SUSE certificates that it could then resell to customers with mixed environments who wanted to buy new Windows servers and purchase Linux machines. In addition, Microsoft gave Novell another $108 million as a “balancing payment” in connection with the patent part of the deal.

This joint marketing initiative worked so well in the first two years that Microsoft committed to buying up to an additional $100 million in SUSE certificates in the summer of 2008. To date, Microsoft has only actually purchased an additional $25 million. In fact, SUSE certificate sales boomed so much in 2007 that they were cited as a major factor in SUSE’s three-point market share gain that year vs. Red Hat.

A look at the numbers after three years
While interoperability was the stated goal of the partnership, financial factors were the key motivator for both companies.

“While technical interoperability was the announced basis for the Microsoft relationship, Novell did the deal because it needed to jump start its Linux subscription sales,” said Bill Claybrook, founder of New River Marketing Research, a firm specializing in Linux. “In November 2006, Novell was on the tail end of four or five consecutive quarters of flat SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription sales. At the same time, Red Hat was reporting year over year increases in revenue and subscription sales of 30% - 40%, and Red Hat was already way ahead of Novell in subscriptions sold and in revenue from subscriptions.”

Fast forward to early 2009, Novell said last February that Microsoft sold $195 million in SUSE certificates through Oct. 31, 2008 at the two-year mark of the five-year agreement. At the three year mark, Microsoft has sold $226 million. Anyone looking at the numbers would reasonably conclude that the enthusiasm for the product has waned. Perhaps it’s the economy’s generally abysmal state in 2009 that accounts for the slow sales, but maybe it’s something else?

With these numbers in mind, it’s not surprising that there has been no further Novell announcement about additional Microsoft purchases of SUSE certificates from last summer’s “up to $100 million” commitment. Nor has there been any additional IDC study of SUSE inroads on Red Hat’s market share.

In addition, Claybrook says a bigger problem on the financial front has to do with what has happened with the purchased Novell certificates. While most have been sold, “… many of the firms that purchased the certificates have not implemented them, meaning that Novell is not collecting renewal subscription revenue.”

The Linux community’s reaction
Initially, reactions to the deal were overwhelmingly negative from the open source community, with very few people showing any optimism about how the partnership with Microsoft could help Linux.

Claybrook said that Novell’s business decision ignored this attitude in favor of the perceived financial incentives.

“Novell felt that the value of Linux interoperability with Windows was more important than what the open source community had to say or felt,” said Claybrook. “The two companies used comments extracted from customers about how important Linux/Windows interoperability was to their businesses as the primary reason that the deal was done. Several of the well-known, open source Linux developers within Novell took serious exception to the Novell-Microsoft deal and some quit the company.”

Stephen Holmes, former Novell Data Center employee and Linux specialist shared his experience and perspective. Holmes was at Novell in 2006, and remembers what it was like when the open source company announced the agreement with Microsoft.

“Those of us looking at it from a purely business perspective had a sense that it was better to play in the sandpit with the bully, to at least get to play with some of the toys (e.g., customers and revenue), rather than look at them playing alone with all of the toys themselves,” shared Holmes.

But not everyone was as pragmatic.

“Those who came from SUSE were incensed that we could dare to jeopardize the integrity and stability (social stability) of Linux and open source with such a deal,” said Holmes. “This played out with an unprecedented level of ire directed at us around that time — anger that persists to this day.”

And truly, it does. One of the most prominent reminders is the ongoing corporate watchdog site, Boycott Novell, which was founded following the pact.

Greater interoperability for end users, and contributions from Microsoft
But after three years, the results of the agreement are panning out. The numbers above indicate that financially, it may not have been the boon Novell was looking for. But technologically, end-users are benefiting from the agreement.

Steve Brasen, principal analyst at EMA shared a positive perspective on the affect on Microsoft’s involvement in open source that the agreement has contributed to.

“Naturally, Windows and Linux will continue to compete as OS platforms (and they should!), but this partnership has already provided concrete results in standardizing management services to aid in the creation of centralized solutions for supporting heterogeneous environments,” said Brasen. “What’s more, there is the potential for this relationship to provide even greater value for Novell customers in the future. For example, by expanding on Hyper-V’s support for SUSE Linux or by enhancing ZENworks with integrated management tools for Microsoft products.”

Holmes credited the partnership with the spurring further kernel interoperability efforts.

“Contributions to the Linux kernel and key projects such as clustering, storage and management have seen massive increase in contributions,” said Holmes. “Simply stated, customers don’t have single platform systems and they demand that companies such as Novell and Microsoft work together on many levels (OS, virtualization, management, security) and in this regard, although the outputs have been small they have mattered — particularly in virtualization interoperability.”

Beyond improved interoperability, Microsoft has become more friendly to and even contributed to open source projects.

“Microsoft is both using and contributing to the OpenPegasus Project’s Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM) and contributing to the open source community interoperable providers that collect management data so it is available for management services,” said Brasen. “I would suggest we should applaud both Novell and Microsoft for establishing this relationship and encourage them to continue with their collaboration efforts.”

More on the Novell and Microsoft pact:
Novell extends interoperability with Microsoft
Microsoft takes on the free world
Novell SUSE 11 to boost virtualization and improve interoperability

On October 20, 2009, Zend released a beta version of Zend Server 5.0, which includes a new feature, dubbed “Code Tracer.”

For the first time, PHP developers and administrators can quickly pinpoint the root cause of a problem in production by viewing a “digital documentary” of the execution of their application – similar to a black box flight recorder in an airplane – and avoid the time-consuming task of recreating the problem.

• Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!
• Windows 7: Microsoft’s Linux killer?
• Windows 7 The Linux killer and Ubuntu Going Mainstream

Linux was thought to be a player in the netbook business, but a Spring 2009 NPD Group study shows that Windows has a 90% share of the netbook OS market. It seems silly to be talking about any Windows desktop operating system as a Linux killer. There are so few Linux client operating systems deployed compared to Windows that this discussion is off target, especially because it appears that Windows 7 is an improvement over Windows Vista.

Today, about 25 or 26 paid Windows client operating systems are shipped for each paid Linux client shipped, according to IDC. Paid Windows client operating systems have more than 90% market share while Mac and Linux make up most of the remaining share. The market share lead that Windows has over Linux is not expected to change much for the foreseeable future.

There are about 30 times as many paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are paid Linux client operating systems deployed. And there are about 13 times as many non-paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are non-paid Linux clients.

Non-paid Linux client shipments are growing faster than paid Linux client shipments while paid Windows client shipments are growing faster than non-paid Windows client shipments. These two trends are also true for Linux and Windows installed bases. Any notion that Linux client operating systems are cutting into Windows’ client dominant market share is ill-founded.

Windows 7 Business, scheduled to ship in October 2009, is expected to be the best Windows client operating system ever. According to IDC, Windows 7 Business will overtake shipments of Vista Business by the end of 2010. Windows XP Professional, Vista’s client predecessor, is also expected to give way to Windows 7 Business by the end of next year.

A unified Linux desktop
So if Linux has any chance of cutting into Windows client’s market share, which flavor of Linux will it be?

Today, the leading Linux client operating system vendor is Red Flag followed by Turbolinux, according to IDC. Ubuntu Desktop has more paid Linux client market share than does Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Desktop or Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). Red Flag also leads in non-paid Linux client shipments with Ubuntu Desktop in second place. RHEL Desktop and SLED have larger shares of the non-paid Linux client shipments than they do of paid Linux client shipments. This is also true for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Desktop is by far the fastest growing Linux client operating system for both paid Linux and non-paid Linux client shipments with three to four times the growth rate of either SLED or RHEL Desktop. With respect to non-paid Linux, Ubuntu Desktop’s market share growth rate is about four to six times the growth rate for SLED and RHEL Desktop. If Ubuntu Desktop continues to grow anywhere nearly as fast as it has grown in the past year, it will shortly be the leading paid and non-paid Linux client operating system in the world.

Ubuntu Desktop got a boost recently when IBM and Canonical launched Linux and cloud-based desktop software in the U.S. The software package, IBM Client for Smart Work, delivers productivity and collaboration software with a savings of up to 50% per seat on software costs versus a Windows-based desktop. The software includes word processing, spreadsheets, etc. from IBM Lotus Symphony; email from IBM Lotus Notes; and cloud-based tools from LotusLive.com

It is not clear whether Ubuntu Desktop can make a dent in Windows client operating system market share, but it is clear that Novell and Red Hat have not been successful and likely will not be successful. Linux vendors have been using security, TCO, and usability as the primary reasons that you should switch from Windows to Linux clients. Security is no longer a differentiator nor is usability, especially with Windows 7. And TCO is a weak argument without application availability. Many of the applications that we take for granted on Windows client operating systems are not available on Linux.

Novell tries to make a strong case for SLED over Windows Vista in a paper titled Lower Your TCO with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (PDF) citing lower TCO, better security, better productivity, etc. Red Hat pushes RHEL Desktop with its enterprise customers. The real hang-ups for Linux client operating systems are lack of applications and the cost/pain of moving from Windows to Linux.

I believe that the only way Linux clients can make a dent in Windows client operating systems’ market share is if the Linux vendors adopt a single Linux client operating system, such as Ubuntu Desktop (with a name change), and market and sell it against Windows. Commercial Linux vendors use the same code base for their Linux client operating systems as they use for their Linux server operating systems, but create separate DVDs for the bits. Even if we consider that cost saving practice, Linux vendors would save considerable engineering/marketing costs by collectively developing and selling a single Linux client operating system.

The open source community has gotten behind Firefox, and its market share has grown from 3.6% in 2004 to more than 20% in 2009. This could also happen to the Ubuntu client operating system with Linux community support. If Ubuntu client could garner 10% of the client operating system market by 2014, over 25 million copies of Ubuntu client would be sold, giving Linux client the volume that it needs to generate serious revenue and placing it on track to become a real competitor to Windows. At $5 per subscription, Ubuntu client would generate $125 million in 2014. Today, the average selling price of Linux client is under $10.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Claybrook is President of New River Marketing Research, a marketing research firm that focuses on Linux, open source software, and commercial grid computing.

I descended into the basement of the Eugene City Brewery (where else would IT geeks meet?), ordered my pint of Rogue Chocolate Stout and joined a smattering of local IT pros who had gathered to have a good brew and talk geek with their peers. It was in this darkened room, with large brew kettles visible through the glass windows behind the projector screen that I was introduced to Lofstrom’s vision of a data center in space.

Location is important in this story – the location of the data center, location of the presentation, and the location of the engineer. Lofstrom lives in Portland, Oregon, a city that has the slogan “It’s not easy being green,” within in a state that has put considerable effort behind attracting green industry. His silvery white hair is neatly pulled back into a low stub ponytail, perfect for fitting under his bicycle helmet as he commutes around the city. His attire is casual, with little frameless glasses that, along with the hair combined to evoke historic images of Benjamin Franklin. It’s clear he’s a thinker, a dreamer even, and he’s passionate about this idea.

Loftstrom explained that it all began when he heard a presentation about data center energy use, and the fact that as we all watch more videos, post more photos, and use the internet, the demand for energy from data centers will only increase. Much has been written about this problem and possible solutions so I won’t bore you with details. But to illustrate, Lofstrom shared the August 9, 2009, Dilbert comic:

Pretty gloomy, but the facts behind this image can be motivational to an engineer like Lofstrom.
He passed around a small device with a flash drive and a couple Ethernet ports that he uses as a firewall for his computer system. This device, he explained, inspired him to think about small physical computing devices that could be solar powered, and Server Sky was born. We all looked at the eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper that he had prepared. On it was a diagram of the Server-sat.

Then Lofstrom explained that the diagram we saw was to scale.

Immediately, audience members had questions. Lofstrom explained that he would get to most of them through the course of the presentation. Incidentally, the presentation was given via a presentation software application he had developed that he hoped to get some more collaboration on because, he said, “If nothing else comes from this, I’d like to get this presentation software improved and kill PowerPoint.”

Lofstrom spent the next hour plus going over orbital physics, Moore’s Law, Newton, light pressure, satellite technology, space junk, and biology. He’s really been doing a lot of thinking on this, but admits he wants and needs more minds focused on it. With a background in open source software, Lofstrom is hoping to keep the project open to contribution from others for as long as possible, “before the investors come in and lock everything up.”

If you’re interested in finding out more information, you can view a recorded video of his presentation from Linux Fest Northwest 2009.

All agreed that these events were good fun. The VooDoo Doughnuts and local wine/beer/vodka/sake tasting was also a smash hit for those attending. For those unable to attend, the livestreaming of keynotes offered by Linux Pro Magazine was appreciated. The recorded kernel panel discussion is now available for on-demand viewing.

Nonprofits using Linux to stay competitive
Beyond the kernel roundtable, the most popular keynote was given by the vice president of information services at Sesame Workshop, Noah Broadwater. If you’re unfamiliar with hearing about Sesame Workshop in tech circles, think Elmo. The group won an Emmy for New Approaches in the Children’s Daytime television category for their associated websites, Web casts and interactivity. Broadwater explained how his organization reuses older Solaris boxes as a testing environment and open source software in the development itself. Using this approach, the nonprofit’s Emmy-winning website came in under budget at less than $3 million. The Sesame Workshop holds onto their new development advances for a two-year period and then contributes them back to the community, in an effort to protect their work from big-budget competitors.

The future of Linux on the desktop
One of the broad themes that was touched on at the conference was Linux on the desktop. Multiple speakers discussed the topic, giving predictions for its success and advice to the larger community about how this might be realized. IBM’s vice president of open source and Linux, Bob Sutor talked about the options - the desktop goes away as people begin to expand their use of mobile devices or the Linux desktop could eventually gain parity with Windows and Mac. Perhaps, as Windows declines in popularity with each more complex release, we could see a rise in Linux desktop popularity. Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager talked about the lack of marketing and suggested that shipping Linux pre-installed on more laptops would be one way to make it accessible to more users. Then there was the entire Moblin track at the conference, presenting the “future” of Linux on the desktop. Finally, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the most popular Linux desktop flavor, Ubuntu, spoke at the conference. He advocated having a shared cadence and coordination between projects and distributions, as well as improving quality and design.

“We definitely shouldn’t give up the desktop,” Shuttleworth said. “This is one of the most exciting years for the desktop in living memory.”

More on Shuttleworth’s talk can be read in an article by Sean Michael Kerner at internetnews.com: Shuttleworth: Don’t give up on the desktop.

Diversity in the Linux community
Another broad theme was that of diversity in the Linux community. Carla Schroder wrote on Monday afternoon that the Linux “community” didn’t look very diverse. And the topic of the involvement of women in the community was brought up more than once. Starting with Linux Foundation President Jim Zemlin’s keynote in which he pointed out that there is a 100:1 ratio between men and women in the Linux community. But the incident that got the most attention was Shuttleworth’s gaffe during his keynote. ( Full disclosure: I was not present at the time of Shuttleworth’s presentation, and therefore cannot speak to the specific wording or context, but others were.) His statement of women not understanding Linux was enough to get a quickly drafted letter from “Geek Feminism” blog author, Kirrily Robert.

Community sharing
I can’t begin to cover all the things that went on at the inaugural LinuxCon. Most agreed it was a good time and well done. For some other perspectives, here are some other attendees opinions and blogs following the show. I will update it or you can add new links to blogs in the comments below.

Practicality shines at LinuxCon 2009 by Phil Odence, Black Duck Software

LinuxCon Review: It’s all about community by Dawn Foster, Fast Wonder Consulting

LinuxCon Audio Diary 1 and LinuxCon Audio Diary 2 by Dan Lynch of Linux Outlaws

Linux from the kernel to the big picture
Highlights so far have included a kernel maintainer panel discussion featuring Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds, Jon Corbet of LWN.net, Chris Wright from Red Hat, IBM’s Ted Ts’o, Novell’s Greg Kroah-Hartmann and moderator James Bottomley. While many positive things were said about the panel discussion, one sentence uttered by Torvalds got the most attention.

“We’re getting bloated and huge, and yes it’s a problem,” said Torvalds in reference to the size of the kernel. “I would love to say that we had a plan. Our icache footprint is scary.”

Yes, the neat tight kernel that Torvalds envisioned and worked to build when he founded Linux is now much larger, with mutiple releases and thousands of lines of code added each year. But as Matt Asay, vice president of business development at Alfresco and blogger at CNET pointed out, this bloat may not be a serious cause for concern as Linux moves into more technologies like mobile devices — instead, perhaps we should celebrate the massive community involvement and progress.

Speaking of Asay, he was the winner of the “Fake Linus Torvalds” competition that the Linux Foundation launched in the weeks leading up to the conference. Each of the competitors used the Linux Foundation’s Twitter account to post missives as if they were the real Torvalds.

On Tuesday OpenSUSE community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier started the day off with a presentation in which he used music as an analogy for Linux. Some highlights were his comparison of Duran Duran with Ubuntu for its “insane” popularity, and The Velvet Underground with Debian, because almost everyone that hears The Velvet Underground wants to go out and start their own band just like almost everyone that uses Debian decides they want to build their own distribution. But, said Brockmeier, Linux should strive to be more like The Beatles. He presented some of the trouble spots that are preventing Linux’s overwhelming popularity (referring to the platform as a “one hit wonder” — on the server) including a glaring lack of marketing and a dearth of functional applications that allow people to do the things they want to do — especially music and video projects.

System adminstrator and developer sessions
Beyond the keynotes, Monday and Tuesday each offered attendees four opportunities to sit down and learn about specific technologies. These sessions were divided into tracks focused on developers, operations, and business interests. I stuck to the operations tracks and found a mixed bag of discussion, product overview, and technical details.

By far the best session I attended was given by Kir Kolyshkin of the OpenVZ project. Kolyshkin presented the product with the right amount of background information and definitions of terms and specifications, and then moved on to the technical details of how and where it could be implemented and gave specifics of what the system needs and what would need to be done from a sys admin perspective.

But sadly, some of the other sessions felt more like an extended sales pitch or didn’t really seem to match with their advertised descriptions. From the feedback I heard from other attendees, the developer sessions were a lot more useful in general.

I give kudos to the organizers for branching out beyond the developer community and involving operations staff in the conference, but there is some room for improvement next year.

With that, I’m off to the final day of LinuxCon!

My very unscientific sampling of conference-goers turned up a mix of reasons that motivated people to attend the recent Red Hat Summit, which equaled or exceeded last year’s event, despite the economic downturn and competition from VMware.

But learning seemed to be the prime motivator. For one thing, the assistant of a workshop presenter observed that the company’s technical workshop was more crowded than the general one, which dovetailed with my experience at other sessions. So I’m guessing that attendees, as a whole, were after highly detailed information to help them do their jobs rather than more topical overviews.

And I’ve just got a hunch that KVM and the coming Red Hat Virtualization platform were a big draw. But you could learn something about this remotely, via Webcasts, news articles, or other outlets. So the real advantage to being there is the additional networking factor.

Two attendees whose primary purpose was networking included Steve Giovannetti, CTO of Hub City Media, and Michael Howard of the U.S. Navy’s Spaware System Center in Charleston, S.C. As a new Red Hat/JBoss Catalyst partner, Hub City Media’s main goal in attending (in addition to being an exhibitor) was “getting to know folks and connecting with customers,” Giovannetti said.

Giovannetti said Red Hat’s vision is “great,” and praised its decision to switch to the KVM hypervisor. Although KVM “has a long way to go,” it’s good that Red Hat will support both KVM and Xen in the interim. “Getting all the virtualization vendors to cooperative will be a challenge… but, ultimately, customers will demand portability,” he said.

Howard, one of three government IT staffers I met at the Summit (a remarkable percentage), also viewed the conference as a networking opportunity. Howard’s main task with the Navy the past four years has been to promote the use of open source in the government and offer user feedback to vendors like Red Hat.

“If I give the open source community our feedback, the taxpayers save millions and the government gets software development for free,” he said.

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, the Navy also is using Red Hat’s JBoss Java application platform and is keenly interested in ensuring that JBoss continues in a strong direction, Howard said.

“JBoss has been great,” he said. “Three of the best JBoss developers in the world work for us.”

David Pullman, a systems administrator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he wants to learn more about KVM because NIST is getting ready to expand its use of virtualization. NIST currently has a small virtualization project with Xen and uses a third-party vendor for high availability and live migration. KVM and Red Hat’s SPICE virtualized desktop both sound interesting, he said.

The lone prize-winner I met at the conference was Rick Gideon, chief operating officer of ecommerce.com. Gideon came to the Summit because his company won the JBoss Innovation award for outstanding architecture.

Based in Columbus, Ohio, Gideon’s firm hosts 500,000 websites and collaborated with EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and others to build an intelligent platform for websites that can be provisioned automatically and dynamically, shifting services as needed based on business rules, he said. The platform runs on Red Hat and JBoss.

“We’re looking to begin partnerships, “ Gideon said. “We’ll be building and deploying [the new system] this year.”

Red Hat pulled off quite a coup with its annual Summit, equaling or slightly topping last year’s 1,200 attendees despite the slow economy, and the conflict with VMworld. Not to mention the disadvantage of running right up to Labor Day weekend. What were they thinking? But the Chicago weather definitely was a plus, with blue skies and temps in the mid-70s.

For me, the highlight of the Summit was the Thursday keynote by CTO Brian Stevens, who went far beyond the platitudes everyone in the audience already knows and spelled out Red Hat’s vision for boosting adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, the former by making virtualization ubiquitous with KVM and the latter by heading up research to make cloud computing portable and more widespread. Two projects singled out for brief video clips were Hail which is developing an open networking protocols and Delta Cloud, a project focused on developing a universal cloud interface. The keynote had energy and drive that is not always seen, surely meant to encourage and excite customers.

Another cool innovation: the Summit allowed attendees to network in advance with EventVue, a Facebook-type venue where attendees could post their photos and interests and email other attendees they wished to meet ahead of the event. This sounds like an idea that will become standard conferencing fare for the future, if it hasn’t already.

Now for the downside: Never in my long career of covering conferences have I ever been kicked out of a workshop. So I was completely stunned to find myself persona non-grata at Randy Russell’s talk on Red Hat certification, which was supposed to be a group discussion, giving attendees an opportunity to provide Red Hat with feedback on certification trends and practices, according to the abstract. But Russell apparently wanted to discuss specific questions on the test, which he did not want public, so he ejected me from the session, then complained that he had expected a much bigger audience. “Not my fault,” I said with a grin, while leaving. Red Hat PR staff scrambled to schedule a phone interview for me the following week but this is the sort of worst foot forward that should never happen. If, in fact, the discussion proceeded as Russell said, I wouldn’t have had much to write anyway and would have left of my own accord.

Secondy, in my opinion the agenda would have been much better organized if it had a separate listing by times with both keynotes and workshops listed, in addition to the listing by topic. Sure, anyone could look vertically across the schedule to compare workshop times, but it would have been nice to have two complete, separate agendas, one by topic, the other by time, and also including other events like lunch and keynotes. But it was nice that the agendas fit in the plastic holders with our IDs. Very handy. Not that I always remembered to keep mine there.

Thirdly, the food was a disaster. To think I was worried about gaining weight; I probably lost. I had been salivating for a repeat of last year’s feast at Boston, with a full breakfast and lots of yummy cookies, with a strong emphasis on chocolate. This year, those of us who arrived early enough to actually get food for breakfast had to stand up, Manhattan style, juggling juice, coffee and muffins along with our laptops. Not only was this not very satisfying but attendees lost an opportunity to network with others over an actual meal. Just to rub it in, I happened by an upper floor meeting room where Red Hat was treating government guests to eggs and bacon, presumably a sit-down affair with a talk. I felt like a starving airline passenger in the first row of coach, smelling the delicious food being enjoyed by first class passengers a few feet away. And it wasn’t just the quality of the meals, but there seemed to be fewer coffee pots and cookies available. Whatever the reason, I wonder if Red Hat pared down everything this year to lower expenses, anticipating a much smaller crowd? And made us eat in the vendor exhibit area to boost eyeballs for the exhibitor booths? Whatever the rationale, Red Hat should scratch the Chicago 2009 food planning and go more upscale next year.

To start with, you can watch most of the Red Hat Summit keynotes and some of the sessions via the video page from Red Hat. This will give you a taste of the large ballroom sessions, and what angle Red Hat’s executives and guest speakers were promoting. Sadly, DreamWork’s Derek Chan’s presentation on how the animation giant is using Linux and Red Hat to render massive 3-D movies isn’t available. The big themes overall were the power of collaboration through open source, interoperability, cloud computing, and meeting business needs faster.

RHEL 5.4 and Satellite 5.3 released, but where is RHEV?
The big news at the Summit was the open availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4. But what was missing was the package of virtualization management tools, referred to as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for servers and for desktops that are slated to be released “later this year.” The release of Red Hat Satellite 5.3 was also announced, and how the new RHEV tools and Satellite will play together remains to be seen. Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Engineering, said that the two are largely complementary and Red Hat will focus on integrating functionality going forward, providing a seamless experience for the end-user. We’ll look forward to seeing all the features of the RHEV release, which Naveen Thadani, Red Hat’s Senior Director of Virtualization explained would be best suited for those who want turn-key virtualization management.

Red Hat Catalyst Partners
The Red Hat Catalyst partner program was launched on the first day of the event, and was seen by some as an effort to appease the unhappy ISV’s who along with some VARs have complained that Red Hat doesn’t “get” partner programs. But at the show the vendors I talked to relayed their satisfaction and enthusiasm for the new program and the promise it offers for codevelopment and packaging of ISV offerings. Some shared with me that in the meeting with partners, when complaints were aired, Red Hat execs pointed to the Catalyst program in their response. It is clear that the company is hoping this initiative will resolve some of the woes of the past – and the partners can do nothing more than be hopeful as well.

The exhibit hall featured many partners displaying their products and I got one to provide a quick demo of their software. Trusted Computer Solutions has created Security Blanket a Linux security product that locks down the operating system and automatically configures it to meet industry standard and customized security requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 are supported (as well as CentOS 4 and 5, Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Fedora 10 and Solaris 10).

Performance tuning and other lessons from the sessions
After a hectic day of press conferences and appointments with various representatives of companies in attendance, I had the chance on Thursday to sit down and listen to some of the session presentations. Red Hat has made some of the session slides available online, including the slides for the back-to-back performance tuning session.

With 131 slides, it is safe the say that Red Hat engineers John Shakshober and Larry Woodman were a bit ambitious, and they didn’t quite get through their deck in the session. But if you are really interested in learning more they provided a lot of good example tools and on slide 128 they provide a list of good resources to check out to learn more about performance tuning. I asked some attendees if they got out of the session what they had wanted. They said that unfortunately, for their high performance computing application that it wasn’t all that relevant, but they had learned some new information and tools that might be helpful. I asked if they couldn’t get Red Hat support to help them with their HPC performance questions and they told me that honestly, they “hadn’t had much luck with that.” I was a bit confused: if you pay for the support, yet you don’t get good help with the support, what’s the point? “Compliance.” So just curious – readers, have you had similar issues? Why do you pay for support licenses on your servers when Fedora is available with no fees?

I also sat in on “Unmatched Security is Manageable” by Spencer Shimko, senior security engineer, Tresys Technology, about using open source system management tools to configure, monitor, and update the security configuration of Linux systems. He covered the open vulnerability assessment language (OVAL), and OVALDI (OVAL + interpreter). I won’t go into too much detail, but we should have a tip on using the language in SearchEnterpriseLinux.com soon.

On Wednesday I sat in on a session on using iSNS to simplify iSCSI management presented by Shyam Iyer, a development engineer senior analyst from Dell and Mike Christie a software engineer at Red Hat. In the manage and secure “What’s Next” track, this presentation discussed how storage management can be simplified with a plug-and-play environment for iSCSI SANs. Iyer discussed the new features being built into the open source storage name service. He also answered a couple questions from attendees regarding how iSNS and iSCSI will fit in a virtualized environment and the differences between it and DNS. The iSCSI network will fit on virtualized guests the same as it would on a hardware environment, explained Iyer. And in the same way that you can have a primary and secondary DNS, you can have a primary and secondary iSNS.

Overall, the summit provided a great opportunity to see and hear about what businesses are doing with RHEL, and learn more about what the future will bring. Our news contributor, Pam Derringer, has written specifically about some of the examples and case studies that we hope you find interesting and useful. If you feel like you missed out this year, next year’s summit will be in Boston, Mass., and perhaps it won’t be scheduled opposite VMworld.

The aim of the project is to model malicious botnets, which are often difficult to analyze because they are geographically spread all over the world, explains Sandia’s Ron Minnich. The more kernels that can be run at once, said Minnich, the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem. “Eventually, we would like to be able to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, in order to virtualize and monitor a cyber attack,” he said.

Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer — at a similar scale as a botnet — would allow researchers to see how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks. “We can get control at a level we never had before,” said Minnich.

A related use for millions to tens of millions of operating systems, Sandia’s researchers suggest, is to construct high-fidelity models of parts of the Internet.

“The sheer size of the Internet makes it very difficult to understand in even a limited way,” said Minnich. “Many phenomena occurring on the Internet are poorly understood, because we lack the ability to model it adequately. By running actual operating system instances to represent nodes on the Internet, we will be able not just to simulate the functioning of the Internet at the network level, but to emulate Internet functionality.”

To complete the project, Sandia utilized its Albuquerque-based 4,480-node Dell high-performance computer cluster, known as Thunderbird. To arrive at the one million Linux kernel figure, Sandia’s researchers ran one kernel in each of 250 VMs and coupled those with the 4,480 physical machines on Thunderbird. Dell and IBM both made key technical contributions to the experiments, as did a team at Sandia’s Albuquerque site that maintains Thunderbird and prepared it for the project.

The capability to run a high number of operating system instances inside of virtual machines on a high performance computing (HPC) cluster can also be used to model even larger HPC machines with millions to tens of millions of nodes that will be developed in the future, said Minnich. This successful demonstration, he asserts, means that development of operating systems, configuration and management tools, and even software for scientific computation can start before the hardware technology is mature.

“Development of this software will take years, and the scientific community cannot afford to wait to begin the process until the hardware is ready,” said Minnich. “Urgent problems such as modeling climate change, developing new medicines, and research into more efficient production of energy demand ever-increasing computational resources. Furthermore, virtualization will play an increasingly important role in the deployment of large-scale systems, enabling multiple operating systems on a single platform and application-specific operating systems.”

Sandia’s researchers plan to take their newfound capability to the next level.

“It has been estimated that we will need 100 million CPUs (central processing units) by 2018 in order to build a computer that will run at the speeds we want,” said Minnich. “This approach we’ve demonstrated is a good way to get us started on finding ways to program a machine with that many CPUs.” Continued research, he said, will help computer scientists to come up with ways to manage and control such vast quantities, “so that when we have a computer with 100 million CPUs we can actually use it.”