We're trialing it. We've recommended to the powers that be here that we purchase it. Now, Brad's just got get them to sign - the delays being mostly the organizational transitions going between mainframe and distributed groups than any thing else.
We started with the 1.0 trial - did that in June. They came on site and we installed together (which was a great opportunity for us to pick up Linux skills from the experts). We have one instance running under 1.0 - we stopped with that because 2.0 was right around the corner. We're still getting 2.0 setup but so far so good. The product does look nice. We have eaten up our DASD farm by cloning the old fashion way (just DDR'ing, changing IPs/hostname, etc) and most of our staffs time (mainly me & a little of another) just maintaining the instances (we have 15-20). We'd really need another FTE to keep going as we have been. Levanta will let you share all of the file systems and what's needed to be r/w is - invisibily to you through their MapFS. Very cool. So, each instance only needs enough extra space for it's unique things. So - I won't have to spend all my time making minidisks and doing copies. Our current method of creating instances makes it hard to keep the patches up to date and keep unique sets of RPMs on instances. Security here does not like "extra" sw to be installed - only what is needed - so creating a huge /usr with all packages is not a good plan either. I looking into sharing some of the stuff - it's not trivial - esp. when your a vm person primarily and linux secondarily :). With Levanta, you don't worry about any of that - it all happens automagically. Feel free to contact me if you have more questions. Oh, the folks there at Linuxcare are the best - fun to work with and very responsive (they helped me out today with reading cd's :). Marcy Cortes Wells Fargo Service Co
