There are distinct advantages to moving to OES over staying on NetWare.
For more information about latest features on OES, see What’s New or Changed in OES 2023 in the OES 2023: Release Notes.
Here are a few of the benefits of upgrading to OES:
NetWare Entered Extended Support in 2010: As Novell cautioned for a number of years, NetWare entered its extended support phase in 2010.
Continued Hardware Support: When NetWare entered extended support, hardware vendors ceased to certify it on new server hardware.
Continued Third-party Solutions Support: As hardware vendors ceased certification support, third-party software solutions providers, such as anti-virus and backup software vendors, stopped developing for the NetWare platform.
Dynamic Storage Technology: This breakthrough Novell technology drastically reduces storage costs and runs only on OES, not on NetWare. However, NSS volumes on NetWare can be assigned as secondary volumes in a pair.
iFolder 3.9: NetWare supports only Novell iFolder 2.x, which lacks important features found in the latest version, such as automatic server provisioning, multiple iFolders per user, iFolder sharing between users, reassigning iFolder ownership, provisioning for LDAP groups, and numerous administrative enhancements.
Open Source Solutions: Open source initiatives such as Apache and Tomcat have been supported on NetWare only as Novell or others have ported them to the platform, but they are automatically available on OES.
Virtualization technologies: Xen and KVM are no-cost virtualization solutions that run on OES servers. The Xen solution lets you create NetWare virtual machines for those services that you want to keep on NetWare for the time being. Both solutions support OES virtual machines.
Domain Services for Windows: This OES technology integrates eDirectory and Active Directory users as well as Windows and Novell file services.
File Systems: OES not only supports the Novell Storage Services (NSS) file system, but also traditional Linux file systems, such as Ext3, XFS, and Btrfs.
Novell Services enhancements: As Novell services continue to evolve, the new features and technologies are available on OES.