> Is anyone using Novells ZEN to manage their zLinux
installations/updates?
> Any tips/hits/gotcha's/etc. ?

It works well enough, but is a substantial resource pig compared to
simpler tools such as yum. As delivered, it is quite large in memory
footprint, and wakes up in the middle of the night and does a bunch of
database processing to ensure it's got all the stuff it's supposed to
have. Not a big deal on a non-shared machine; very big deal on a shared
machine when several dozen machines all wake up at the same time and try
to beat the daylights out of the Zenworks server. It does a lot of XML
parsing and munging to determine package state, which is very CPU
intensive, both on server and client, and there's a lot of network
bandwidth involved in schlepping all that XML around to get a couple of
simple package release numbers back and forth. 

It's analogous to any enterprise package management tool. If you've gone
to the trouble to use Zenworks to manage other platforms in your
environment, then it's probably worth using it on Z. If you haven't,
then explore other lighter-weight options. 

:rant.(I wish someone would convert RH and SuSE to APT. RPM is just not
up to the demands of complex environments.):erant.

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