Chapter 1. The Evolution of Linux Management

In August 2003, Novell acquired a company called Ximian. Ximian was founded with the goal of building enterprise-class Linux solutions. One of these solutions was called Red Carpet, which was initially built to help Ximian Desktop customers keep their Linux systems up to date. Because a Linux system is basically a collection of packages (RPMs), the Ximian engineers built Red Carpet to deal with the multiple RPM dependencies. Red Carpet consisted of two components. The first component was the Red Carpet Daemon, an open source daemon which could be used to get software updates for one system at a time. The second component was called Red Carpet Enterprise, which was a proprietary, inside-the-firewall solution that enabled enterprises to manage their Linux systems centrally. Shortly after acquiring Ximian, Novell re-branded Red Carpet Enterprise to ZENworks Linux Management.

This book discusses the features and capabilities of ZENworks 7 Linux Management. ZENworks 7 Linux Management is a major release to ZENworks Linux Management, and it includes many new capabilities that aren't found in other Linux management products. ZENworks 7 Linux Management brings to the Linux platform many of the features that current ZENworks customers have been using on Windows. However, ZENworks 7 Linux Management is built on a brand-new service-oriented architecture (SOA). This new architecture will be adopted by other ZENworks products in future releases.