Inside the Novell Linux Migration

By: Brian Proffitt
Thursday, October 6, 2005 11:29:56 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6033/1/

Drinking Their Own Champagne

It is open knowledge that Novell, the company that roared into the open source arena by purchasing Ximian and SUSE in 2003, has been progressing towards migrating their own internal desktops and servers to a pure-Linux play. Or, at least, as pure Linux as possible.

Details of Novell's migration have been sketchy, but in a public presentation to attendees of Ohio LinuxFest, company specialists gave a rare look inside the ongoing move to Linux and laid out one possible framework for other companies to follow in their own migration plans.

Dan Rusek and Mark Richards, both category specialists for Novell, provided a tag-team presentation on how Novell's migration was planned and how it is being implemented now. Novell has chosen to tackle two facets of migration: one, the shifting of its Provo, Utah data center servers to more of a Linux environment and two, the migration of its employees' desktops at its Waltham, Massachusetts headquarters from Windows to Linux.

Besides the obvious desire to eat its own dog food (Novell, Rusek intoned, prefers to call it "drinking their own champagne"), the company also wanted to prove to itself and to others outside Novell that such a large enterprise could make the move to Linux. Rusek also explained to the crowd that by accomplishing this migration, they would be blazing a trail for others to follow. Those others are not just customers, either. As the migration proceeds, Novell's own engineers receive feedback from the project and learn how to make their offerings more migration friendly.

There were some more practical reasons for deciding to make the migration, Rusek added. Novell believes that by shifting to Linux, the company will enjoy a far smaller cost of ownership, much more security, and greater flexibility in how they can use their platforms.

Before they implemented their plans, Novell conducted their own TCO studies, and determined that the costs to install and administer Linux would be the same or slightly less than doing the same with UNIX or Windows. The same would hold true, Rusek explained, for hardware costs. In the areas of software support and virus remediation, however, Linux would be far cheaper than its counterparts.

Phasing In the Servers

In their Provo data center, Novell elected to take a phased approach to the migration for their servers. In 2003, the percentage breakdown for the server operating systems fell along these lines:

• Linux: 6.1%
• Solaris: 17.1%
• NetWare: 34.7%
• Windows: 38.0%
• HP-UX: 4.1%

In the following year, the numbers broke down to these percentages:

• Linux: 18.5%
• Solaris: 11.4%
• NetWare: 29.1%
• Windows: 37.8%
• HP-UX: 3.2%

In 2004, Linux servers increased mostly at the expense of the Solaris, Netware, and HP-UX deployments. Rusek explained that since many applications were still Windows dependent, the total percentage of Windows machines remained nearly constant from 2003 to 2004. Novell, he added, is pressuring its software vendors to provide Linux versions of their software so more Windows servers can be phased. By 2005, some progress seems to have been made.

• Linux: 29.3%
• Solaris: 9.5%
• NetWare: 25.3%
• Windows: 33.2%
• HP-UX: 2.7%

By the numbers Rusek revealed, the UNIX deployments are currently the main target of Novell's migration to Linux in the data center, with HP-UX all but completely phased out the door and Solaris not too far behind it. If Novell can use its large customer status to bring about more Windows-to-Linux application ports, then the Windows server numbers will be to decline faster, too.

Three Ways to the Linux Desktop

On the desktop side of the migration, Richards laid out the migration plan in more detail.

Facing the Novell IT team is a company of about 5,000 users and a total of about 15,000 workstations. 60 percent of these workstations are laptops. Windows 2000/XP users made up 95% of the workstation population and Office 2000/XP users making up 95% of the Windows group.

To approach this daunting task, Novell created their own Open Desktop Initiative. First, any volunteers who wished could switch over to a Linux desktop cold turkey. This would immediately gain Novell a cost savings in their licensing fees, and would form a group of trailblazers who could act as mentors for employees who would migrate later. Second, the company created an intranet section known as the OpenZone, where documentation and support would be readily available to users as the migration proceeded.

Novell decided to use a three-pronged approach to making the desktop move to Linux. License management would be the first undertaking, followed by the migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. Finally, desktop operating systems would be moved from Windows to the Novell Linux Desktop.

License management might not seem like a glamorous approach, but it immediately saved Novell quite a bit of money right out of the gate. Richards said that essentially the users were asked to look on their machines and see which Windows version that machine was originally loaded with. Those machines that came with Windows 2000 but had been later upgraded to Windows XP were essentially double-licensed. Once these machines were rolled back to their original OEM versions of Windows, Novell saved nearly $900,000 per year in licensing costs.

Taking on OpenOffice.org

When the migration project first started, license management was applied to the Office application suite as well. One early deadline in the project was to have only one Microsoft Office license per employee by March 31, 2004. Given that many employees had more than one workstation, this would mean that either no office application would be on machines, or machines would use OpenOffice.org, regardless of the operating system. Immediately, the cost of Office licenses was cut to nearly a third of its former total.

Another deadline in the project was a mere four months later, when all employees were expected to use OpenOffice.org by July 31 of that same year. Again, this was regardless of platform.

To accomplish this task, Novell users were directed to initially use native OpenOffice.org formats for internal communications, PDF documents for read-only documents sent outside of the company, and Office format documents only for external documents that needed collaboration. Aiding in the transition, Novell's Corporate Communication department created templates in OpenOffice.org that matched existing Office templates.

In making the move, Richards explained, there were very few problems in converting existing Office documents to OpenOffice.org formats. Even documents with highly stylized templates translated well. It helped that the company used tools embedded within the open source office suite to convert whole directories of files en masse.

Some problems did crop up. Novell learned that Office-formatted documents created in OpenOffice.org would not always open well in external users' Office suites. Also, many existing macros had to be re-created, and a substitute for Visual Basic-based macros had to be found.

Novell was able to meet its OpenOffice.org goal, and was more than ready to take on the next challenge: getting Linux on the desktops of its employees.

Windows, to Dual-Boot, to Linux

To make the transition to Linux, Richards emphasized repeatedly that the goal of such a migration was not to force people to make the move to Linux from Windows just for Linux's sake.

"You can't shoehorn this in," he told the audience, "Is Linux a 100% replacement for Windows? It will be, but not yet."

Making the transition easier was giving users a choice on how much control they had in the actual migration. Novell gave their users four paths to migration options: do it yourself, where users would implement Linux with guided instructions if they needed them; work with me, an option that would have an IT staffer standing next to the user as they installed the software; install it for me, which would put the installation in the IT worker's hands; and finally an installfest, where whole groups of workers would bring their machines to a central meeting place and install Linux (with food and beverages provided, of course).

Novell's goals for this part of migration are being met. By October 31, 2004, 50% of Novell employees were to be using Novell Linux Desktop at the very least on a dual-boot system. By October 31 of this year, the goal is 80% of Novell employees on single-boot Linux systems. Richards told the crowd that they were well on their way towards this upcoming goal. However, according to Richards own figures, as of September 30, 2153 of 5342 employees are on single-boot Linux systems, which is only 40 percent.

Still, Novell remains committed to making this migration work. The hard part, Richards explained, was yet to come. The last 20 percent of desktop users would be the hardest to migrate, as they represent users with a serious business process investment in Windows. Novell, being such a large enterprise customer itself, has been able to leverage its size to get independent software vendors to port their applications to Linux, but it would still take some time.

But besides the obstacles, the costs are going to be worth it. Rusek demonstrated that currently it costs $528.02 for a combined Windows XP/Office license. Novell's own Linux Desktop costs $45.70 annually, and includes upgrades. Even though the Novell costs are annual, Rusek pointed out the obvious: in terms of licensing costs, it would take 11.5 years for Novell's costs to build up to what Windows XP/Office costs now and upgrades would be included in the Novell license structure--not Microsoft's.

Both Rusek and Richards were quick to point out that what worked for Novell is not a given to work in another corporate migration. Their company's experiences were to be taken as guidelines only. But, in general, the duo emphasized from general tips that most organizations could follow:

• Find advocates for Linux and open source in your company.
• Have the leadership of your company be passionate about any migration.
• Set clear objectives and communicate them.
• Do your homework on applications.
• Have an OpenOffice.org strategy
• Don't try to shoehorn Linux in at the cost of losing productivity

Finally, they explained, companies should see some immediate savings as Windows licenses are retired and as expensive UNIX hardware is phased out.

As Novell proceeds on their migration path, they will have gained quite a bit of experience in making Linux transitions. Experience that should only benefit their customers and anyone else looking to make a move to Linux.