From evilzenscientist’s blog:
“evilzenscientist :: thoughts � ZENworks 7 imaging: “ZENworks OS imaging has always been based on the Linux kernel – it’s fast, efficient, has a great networking stack and is also extensible. None of the problems of DOS and getting NDIS drivers etc.
Earlier versions of ZENworks – (ZfD 3.x, ZfD 4.0, ZENworks 6, ZENworks 6.5) – spawned a slew of sites dedicated to tweaking this Linux environment. Notable is the Novell Forge Project zfdimgdrv. The imaging environment has also been extended by the likes of ENGL.
ZENworks 7 changed to a SLES 9 SP2-based kernel; this provides extensive hardware support (and real support; things that have been tested).”
(Back to T.J.’s Thoughts:) I think this is another excellent reason to upgrade – matching drivers – especially with the Dell Optiplex line – has been a nightmare with previous versions of imaging. I know most of these machines are supported well with SLES 9 – I’ve been running it on a couple in test senarios on and off for a while. I do have ZenWorks under my SLA, so the cost is nill for me, and the benifits are starting to far overweight the potential problems.
Go for it!
If you already have ZENworks under SLA you can probably save the project costs by migrating from (another imaging product) to ZENworks right now. The license savings are generally pretty significant.