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Linux Business

Enterprise Software for Linux? 16

Posted by Cliff from the breaking-the-hobbyist-barrier dept.
Ben Mayer asks: "I work for a company that is looking to start using Linux on our servers along side of the Windows 2000 boxes that we already have. We have been looking at tools like HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli for package distribution and backups. They both support Windows and a variety of U*IX but not Linux. I have spent a couple of days searching but have not found any products that support Win 2k and Linux and are of enterprise quality. Is Linux lacking in this area?"
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Enterprise Software for Linux? More

Enterprise Software for Linux?

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  • Tivoli (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @04:14AM (#2757871) Homepage Journal
    Tivoli surely is on linux [ibm.com]! C'mon, they are a division of IBM. They promote use of Tivoli on linux for the whole @Server line.

    You'll only be sorry once you see the price tag for licensing and services.

    Really.

    Ouch...

  • Your best bet (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ringbarer ( 545020 )
    Is to scrub Linux and go with a Solaris variant. The software you mention is easily available for these platforms. The point of Linux is that it is a free O/S, but remember that the cost of a proprietory Unix is only a teeny-tiny fraction of the overall licensing fees for the Enterprise software you require. You get what you pay for, I guess.
    • Is to scrub Linux and go with a Solaris variant. The software you mention is easily available for these platforms. The point of Linux is that it is a free O/S, but remember that the cost of a proprietory Unix is only a teeny-tiny fraction of the overall licensing fees for the Enterprise software you require. You get what you pay for, I guess.

      How did this happen? Somebody makes a frank recommendation, on-topic and non-flamebaity, and it gets modded down to -1? Just because it recommends going with Solaris over Linux? Sometimes peer moderation sucks.

  • Tivoli support Linux for most things now (Score:3, Informative)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Friday December 28, 2001 @09:59AM (#2758276)
    Tivoli supports Linux for Inventory, Software Distribution and Distributed Monitoring.

    Be aware, though, that enterprise management products get very expensive. My (rather large) organization is doing a Tivoli rollout that will cost about millions of dollars over 4-5 years and require a staff of about 10 to manage. This includes licensing, hardware costs and consulting time.
  • OpenView and Tivoli are for either very large budgets, or very large, distributed companies. NNM is pretty neat and all. It discovers your network for you, draws a really inaccurate map that you have to manually tweak. Then you find out that most of the features you want aren't part of NNM. You have to buy ITO (now called VantagePoint, IIRC). Then, you want to graph loads and network utilization. Guess what? Another $5-15k down the tubes. As far as I've been told Tivoli is the same way.

    My point is that no matter which of those two you buy, you're going to need to do some substantial work to get them set up properly. Why not invest your time into something that is cheaper and, in most cases where you're monitoring
    Where I work, I ousted OpenView and replaced it with NetSaint [netsaint.org] and Cricket [sourceforge.net]. I also wrote a bunch of other CGI scripts to search my syslog archives and things of that nature. They aren't very difficult to maintain once you get the hang of it, and they're free.

    If you're really set on something grand, I've been keeping an eye on OpenNMS [opennms.org] which is more to the scale of NNM or Tivoli. Give their page a readover - they're nearing a 1.0 release, last I checked. Remember, you can always spend that cool million that's burning the hole in your pocket to hire the lead developer of one of those projects to come in to your company and 'Make it So.'

    Good Luck!
    • oops ... that hanging sentence is: where you're monitoring (less than)500 nodes, better. that darn lessthan sign and html ... ;)

    • It sounds like he's wanting to do things that systems like OpenView and Tivoli (and, more specifically, SMS [microsoft.com]) do that we (OpenNMS) don't do yet, unfortunately.

      OpenNMS is not agent-based (other than SNMP agents for performance data), and so has no real way to initiate network backups and/or push configurations. It sounds he's more interested in the parts of MS's SMS that do change management than the bits that do network management.

      If you're looking for the network management functionality that SMS/NNM/ITO/Tivoli/Unicenter/etc. provide, OpenNMS is quickly becoming quite spiffy; if you're looking for change management, we're not even broadly focused on that. Unless someone gives us a big development contract to veer from our 1.0 goal, I doubt it will be anytime soon.

      • Egads, how could you mention SMS in the same sentence as any other Enterprise management suite? I can't count how many companies I've helped rip out SMS and replace it with anything else.
        SMS only works in huge corporations where MS feels like enough money is being spent that they are willing to send a team of SMS developers over.
        (If anyone's interested, that's also how they got NT 3.x/4.x into Fortune 100 co's like AT&T, UPRR, BellAtlantic, etc. The big boys which MS lists as using NT aren't using the same NT that you and I buy. Fortunately that's pretty much, finally, changed as of Win2k).
        Not to mention SMS doesn't support Linux and so isn't even on-topic for the question above.
        Geez...
        :)
        And just to be on-topic myself - go with Tivoli. My answer would have been OpenView as the best of a bad bunch a few years ago, but Tivoli's really come along since then.

        • Nononono! Don't confuse me mentioning SMS's feature set with anything resembling recommending it... it's an evil, scary, horrible program. It just sounds like the Ask Slashdot poster was looking for something that does some of the things SMS does, but correctly, and on a real OS, and I was pointing out that OpenNMS does not really do change management, just network management, so it's not a correct fit (yet). =)

          Phew! Don't do that to me... I nearly got a heart attack thinking I came off as suggesting SMS. <shudder>

  • You'd want all three products [bladelogic.com] : Network Shell, Configure, and Audit.

    Have not used them but this is one of the products we are considering purchasing here at work. I like that it is easy to use native package formats (at least on UNIX). Many other distribution platforms require the software to be repacked rather than use e.g. RPM for Linux and pkgadd for Solaris. But Bladelogic seems to be based much more around using the native package formats, which is great if you download a lot of packages off the 'net (e.g. from sunfreeware like we do here).

    Anyone know any good alternatives to Bladelogic?

  • OpenNMS (Score:1, Redundant)

    by danpbrowning ( 149453 )
    Opennms.org, may not be enterprise-class yet, but you should check it out.
  • http://www.stokely.com/ [stokely.com]

    A good place to start looking. It's for users of regular Unix, even on so poor a processor as an x86. ;)

    I haven't found one better maintained, nor so unbiased.

  • 1st, call the Linux vendors: IBM, RedHat, SUSE, HPaq(?), and whoever else wants to play. Always do that first, and do exactly what you would do in the real world if you weren't buying software: ask the guy on the phone who they would recommend if they don't carry what you need. If they won't help you, find someone else at that company to talk or get their boss on the phone. Just asking a company "Do you have a product that does X, Y, and Z?" indicates to them some product demand, and they just might add such a product to their line-up on the basis of a few inquiries and a junior manager looking to climb the corporate ladder.

    Head over to bsdmall.com and look under "Applications". They have commercial software for FreeBSD (mostly), almost all of which also has a Linux version you can order off the site. Heavily slanted towards ISPs, but take a look.

    The other tool I would hunt down is VA's software for the Wired-For-Management (WFM, EMP, Wake-On-Lan, PEX, blah blah blah) features of Intel motherboards. It's like HP OpenView but just for controlling the motherboards over the LAN or out-of-band through the EMP.

    And there are some do it yourself solutions (for which you could hire a consultant):

    - Installing SNMP on your linux boxes. HP OpenView can talk to that -- that's all it basically does, beside the plugins and the availability of HPOV consultants... ;-)

    - http://www.infrastructures.org Self explanatory, strongly recommended reading.

    - Use a "meta" package. Use the packaging tools of your distribution (rpm, deb) to make your own package. You don't have to put anything in it (but you can). The idea is to then make that meta package dependant on the packages you want installed. Then create answers files for each package to make sure all the yes/no/select questions get answered automatically. Then you can boot the PC off the network, enter the command to install the meta package (or set up the rc scripts to do it) and you can rebuild any of your machines automagically in a few unattended minutes. Customize the pre- and post- install script for more power.

    - Dave Roth has a good article describing a very affordable solution for bring an NT WAN under automatic control using Perl. The same concepts could be applied to NT without too much heavy thinking. If you use 2000, you've probably already read this, but check it out: http://www.roth.net/conference/lisant/1999/

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