Foundation server now supports R8.5 Domino... and I support my Telco

Now that LFS 1.1 has been released I can upgrade my Domino R8.01 server add-on to R8.5 to match the R8.5 Admin and Design clients that I've been using for the last six months or so. Since Domino is not core Foundations OS code the files need to be downloaded as a separate exercise just like the "Run" add-on module I mentioned in my last post.

• The Run module is lf-run11-5800.zip and comes in at 116mb
• The R8.5 Domino server is lfstart-domino850-5892.zip and weighs 673 mb.

So that's almost 800mb of download I need by sunset.

Just another day spent making my Telco richer.
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VMWare is now running on Lotus Foundations Server

The VMWare module for the LFS environment is now available for download and installing it is a three step process.

1. Upgrade your core server code to Lotus Foundations Start V1.1.0 which is just a standard software update and handled automatically by LFS once you give it permission to do so. Alternatively, you can install Lotus Foundations Branch Office.
   
   
2. Install the "Run" add-on which comes on the Foundations media packs and is also available as a download from IBM. The process is fundamentally the same as installing the Domino server add-on - just copy the .pkg file to the autoinstall directory then click the install button.
   
   
3. The third step - the installation of the VMWare module - is a little trickier. The VMWare module is only downloadable by IBM/Lotus business partners who are empowered by IBM to pass it on to their customers. There is no additional fee paid to IBM for this module. Once you have the VMWare module you will need to register it with VMWare to gain the linux license serial keys which you need to run the module. There is no fee for the licence keys but there is a limit of five keys per customer registration.

I hate registering my name with organisation with whom I have no regular business dealing but I think the deal is fair. IBM has tweaked LFS to run a VMWare environment but they are not selling the VMWare experience - that is just another option which they give you. On the other hand VMWare is providing a free sample of their environment to LFS customers but if you want to move beyond five licence keys then presumably you'll need to contact VMWare and start talking about upgrades.

Now how soon will it be before we see a 90 day trial of Quickr and SameTime servers bundled with Foundations?

I'm not taking bets.
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Lotus Foundations licencing discriminates against Macs?

While trolling through the Lotus Foundations on-line help files (Alright! I admit it! I don't have a social life!) I came across the following anomoly:

*****************************************************
A Lotus Foundations Start CAL includes a license to run a subset of available desktop clients. The supported options are:

* Lotus Notes 8.x Standard for Windows
* Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) 8.x for Windows
* Lotus Notes 7.0.2 for Mac

A number of client options are not covered by this license. These include, but are not limited to:

* Lotus Domino Administrator & Designer
* Lotus Notes for Linux
* Lotus Notes 8.x for Mac

*****************************************************

I can understand that the Admin and Designer clients need a separately purchased CAL and I can almost twist logic sufficiently to forgive Lotus for excluding all Linux clients for technical compatibility reasons, but can someone from Lotus explain why you can give a user Notes 7.02 on a Mac as a valid Foundations CAL but if you upgrade their Notes to the same R8 version as the rest of your Foundations community then you need another CAL?
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How far can you go with Lotus Foundations Branch Office?

I've been looking at Lotus Foundations Branch Office (LFBO) recently. First up, full marks for the Foundations Team for upgrading the documentation to a standard worthy of IBM. Well done guys. Second, let's see how far LFBO goes as a Domino server. Here's an except from the LFBO Administration guide.


Lotus Foundations Branch Office contains a Lotus Domino server that may be used like any other Lotus Domino server, but there are some Lotus Foundations Branch Office licensing differences:

• It must be used as a ″spoke″ within an existing Lotus Domino Enterprise server ″hub and spoke″ infrastructure
• It must connect into a hub that is a Lotus Domino Enterprise server or IBM Lotus Domino Messaging Server
• It can be used with up to 500 users
• The Lotus Foundations Branch Office server cannot be clustered
• It does not include bundled packages normally included in other Lotus Domino® packages, such as IBM® WebSphere® Application Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Server, IBM Tivoli® Directory Integrator or IBM DB2® Enterprise Edition packages

I can live without clustering and the Websphere/Tivoli/DB2 bundle but the gotcha is in the hub and spoke rule. A Foundations server can't be a hub so you can't create a hub and spoke topography consisting of just two Foundations servers. To be fair to IBM, they are selling this unit as a Branch Office solution so you're getting exactly what you paid for.

Where I'm unclear at the moment is how LFBO works in an organisation with (say) 900 users equally divided between three sites with the primary site as a Domino Enterprise server talking to a couple of remote LFBO servers on the spokes. It might need some technical juggling to reconcile the Foundations security model with the existing Domino Enterprise server address book, especially if you are migrating two thirds of your existing Domino ids into Foundations ids.

One things for sure... this model will take more than 30 minutes per server to set up and bed down.
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Is Lotus Foundations better than Cloud Computing ?

I've been very quiet for the last six weeks, not because there's nothing to say about Lotus Foundations, but because I've been involved on other projects. This will change over the next month and this blog will start bubbling over again. In the meantime, take a look at this article from Ferris Research...

I think Nick Shelness is right on the money with this one. Cloud Computing might be fine for the large corporates but its a big step into the unknown for the little guy. IMHO most SMB want to see their server physically sitting in the corner of the office where it's permanently accessible and not costing them hosting fees. They might want to arrange an automated fail-over into the Cloud Computing environment if their appliance falls over, but that's probably as far as it goes.
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