SALT LAKE CITY -- Novell used its BrainShare conference to elaborate on its product migration path to Linux, which included an assurance to customers that it will support NetWare well into the next decade.

The annual event, which Novell said drew 6,000 attendees, featured a series of product announcements, including a preview of Open Enterprise Server (OES), due to ship in June 2007. Other new offerings include Version 10 of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, a suite of workgroup programs and software for mobile users.

This next edition of OES – code named Cypress - will only run NetWare on Linux as a guest operating system under the open source Xen or VMware’s ESX Server virtualization platforms. Existing OES implementations let IT run either a NetWare or Linux kernel.

Many NetWare customers say they will migrate to the Linux-based OES when a NetWare kernel is no longer available. One issue preventing them from doing so now is that Novell’s Network Storage Services (NSS) as well as its file permissions and access rights are not fully supported in Linux.

“We want to stay with the NSS file system as it has numerous advantages over other options such as the [Windows NT File System] or any of the available Linux file systems,“ says Chuck Perilli, a consultant in Washington, D.C., who manages seven NetWare 6.5 servers. “We are looking at the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) on OES-Linux as an option, but our testing has shown there are still a few glitches in Novell’s implementation of NSS on Linux."

E. Axel Larsson, enterprise integration specialist for Computing and Network Services at Drew University in Madison, N.J., runs Novell’s eDirectory and Identity Manager user provisioning product on Linux, but he voices similar concerns. “We would anticipate moving most of our current NetWare services over to Linux when Novell is able to close the performance and stability gap on file and print services between NetWare and Linux," he says.

Jason Williams, OES product manager at Novell, says that while NCP on the Linux kernel in OES does not support the Novell Archive Server or Distributed File System junctions, which allow Windows Common Internet File System clients to access a NetWare 6.5 server, the Cypress version of OES will. He adds that recent tests show NSS on Linux out-performing NSS on the NetWare kernel.