Novell,MS and Xen

[Paul Lussier]

Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com> writes:

> I only meant to point out that the interoperability problems you mentioned 
> aren't all unworkable.  The NFS may be, but I haven't ever had need to use 
> the Windows NFS tools.  The others were doable, some easily.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood.  True, they are workable, however, not
always in an easily scalable way.  For instance, it may that a given
mail client on Linux works with Exchange.  But consider for a moment
how you might get an automated test suite to interoperate with
Exchange?

Exchange shops often use features like calendaring and scheduling as
well as address books from the mail clients[1].  A lot of this
information might be very useful to an automated test suite that needs
to do things like reserve resources, send mail, access shared
"folders", etc.  If it's all in wrapped up in Exchange, a Linux client
has little hope of being able to deal with it easily.

And how about authentication and single sign-on?  Linux can run as a
Kerberos server just fine using either MIT or Heimdal Kerberos
implementations.  Combine either of those with LDAP, and you've got a
pretty slick environment.  Venture guess how easy it is to get MS to
play along with an environment like this?[2]

No, sadly, virtualization won't solve interop problems between two
incompatible environments.  It may ease the pain in a largely
unscalable fashion, but that's just masking the problem.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul


[1] All of this is also combined with things like DHCP and DNS.  But
    it's largely hidden from the end user.  Even things which *should*
    be simple like having a Linux client get DHCP information from an
    AD DHCP server is often problematic because DHCP on AD isn't
    necessarily compatible (again, there are work arounds, but why
    must the concessions always be made by one party, when the other
    *ought* to be following the STANDARD protocol?!).

[2] There is a webpage at Microsoft's sight which attempts to explain
    how an MS client can authenticate against an MIT kerberos server,
    however, no one I've spoken to has ever had any success in getting
    it to work.