Dear Dr. Theopolis....

A couple weeks ago, Novell released it's latest version of ZENWorks - ZENWorks Configuration Management (ZCM). I first saw this version at Brainshare 2007 in Salt Lake City. One of the first things that struck me about this new ZEN is that it does not run on NetWare. This is not a big surprise, as Novell has been steadily moving away from NetWare for a couple years now. In fact, while we use a lot of Novell products, we are currently only using NetWare for file and print, backup, and ZENworks. My GroupWise server is now on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, same with my web sites and web services. iFolder 3 is also on Linux, being hosted on a OES server. When I saw ZCM in March, I liked the fact that it ran on OES or SLES, as well as Windows. The install looked like it would be pretty clean and easy. This week I decided to see if these first impressions held true in the released product.

Being a small company, I can't afford to buy a new server every time new software is released. So, I decided to re-task my retired GroupWise server. We still run GroupWise, but moved it to new hardware when we moved it to Linux. The server I installed ZCM on is nothing special - 2 GB of RAM and mirrored 40 GB IDE drives. I plan on adding a couple 750 GB drives for imaging, once I get to that point.

The first step in the install was obtaining the media and license. We have the Open Workgroup Suite, with maintenance. I logged into the Novell Customer Center, and found that I already had ZCM available, since I own the ZEN suite as part of my Open WorkGroup Suite license. I say "already", because in the past it's been a little bit of a fight to get my licenses updated in the Novell Customer Center. Novell seems to have worked through any issues, and the customer center works pretty smoothly now. I grabbed the ISO for ZCM (over 3GB) and my license code. While waiting for the download, I started an install of SLES 10 SP1 on my old GroupWise server. The SLES 10 install was uneventful, and finished without a problem. I configured the automatic updates, and let the SLES 10 server take all available updates. By this time, the ZCM download was finished, and I burned it to a DVD.

The ZCM install was even easier than the simple install of SLES 10. Kudos to Novell for a simple install experience. I answered a couple questions to name the management zone for the ZCM server, give the ZEN admin a password, and choose a database option. I chose to use the included Sybase database, as we are a pretty small shop. Note: on a recent Novell Open Audio podcast, Martin Buckley said the included Sybase db is as scalable - or even more scalable - as Microsoft SQL server. So, even large shops should be able to use the included database. That was it for the install, just those 3 questions, then it did the file copy, and launched the web based admin utility.

That's it for the install. Next time, I'll start digging into the web based admin, and start setting up some workstations with ZCM.