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Xen Not Ready for Prime-time, says Red Hat
daria42 writes "A senior Red Hat executive today maintained the Xen open source virtualisation environment was not yet ready for enterprise use, despite 'unbelievable' customer demand and the fact rival Novell has already started shipping the software."
Xen demonstrate Windows running on top of Xen using an Intel processor with VT
"Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware"
That's not entirely true. Xen 3 can use Intel's VT-x technology for operating systems like Windows. As long as Windows is a guest OS under the system, you should be able to get it to work.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
wholeheartedly with RedHat on this one. I have rolled out about 12 Xen VM's in our QA dept, and have had lots and lots of very strange little quirks happen, things like SSH/SCP failing with Invalid MAC errors on large file transfers, and a few other things that make it barely usable for what I'm trying to do. I used Virtuozzo at my last job with very large numbers of VM's on a node to 1:1 depending on needs, and it was always rock solid. So I am now playing around with OpenVZ to replace Xen.
From TFA:
"We don't feel that XenSource is stable enough to address banking, telco, or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it."
He's talking about environments like the one I work in, where we're expected to deliver a real, honest-to-betsy, 99.999 uptime on our systems. We do sometimes use RHEL in the enterprise for those platforms, but to be fair, it's mostly in RAIC (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers) type applications, or non-call-path systems. Many of our call-path-systems are boxes that can lose a processor without the OS going down - or the application running on it. There are some stand-alone Linux products, and they perform well enough, but I understand his reservations in those arenas. We're not talking about fileservers here, folks. But as we move to a more distributed architecture, where uptime is provided by redundancy rather than the 'robustness' of a single system, something like Xen will become more and more feasible for such applications.
Thinking outside my Head
Xen was a big hype last year, but more virtualization products for Linux come to light, including OpenVZ, others. It is not just about Xen or VMware anymore. In fact, kernel developers work on a common interface for paravirtualization software. That means users are going to have more choice implementing their kernel containers, whether XenSource stabilizes their product or not.
Except it doesn't support ACPI, which makes it pretty useless for a laptop, which is where I do most of my development. From the XenFaq:
I'm using the gratis VMWare Server until the day that Xen actually suits my needs.