Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Xen Not Ready for Prime-time, says Red Hat

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fighting-a-losing-battle dept.

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."

8 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. In other news by Black+Parrot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > A senior Red Hat executive today maintained the Xen open source virtualisation environment was not yet ready for enterprise use

    In other news, a senior Xen spokesman said Red Hat was not yet ready for enterprise use.

    Why are the pronouncements of executives considered newsworthy?

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re:In other news by eno2001 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem is that PHBs only trust what PHBs in other companies say. They don't have the ability to grasp the concepts of the products they are trying to sell which is why many really great things never see the light of day. Sadly, if you leave the company in the hands of the techs, we tend to have little to no business sense and therefore the companies we run tend to go down in flames, in spite of the incredible products we might offer. (See: Digital Equipment Corporation. They had 64-bit before everyone else. Not only that, but they had a laptop that was 64-bit and running Windows NT, OpenVMS and Digital Unix. We're still not there today.)

      --
      -"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
    2. Re:In other news by cerberusss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why are the pronouncements of executives considered newsworthy?

      Why not? You may not, but I find this very interesting. It says something about the adoption of Xen. You'd rather have an article on some technical Xen stuff, fine, but there's an outside world as well.

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  2. Understanable given the risks by gigne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why make this sound like a bad thing? For a developer and retailer of enterprise class software, this is the most appropriate action to take. They need to make sure that the software is competently ready, not just in the eyes of Novell, but in their own eyes. Considering the complexity of such virtualisation software, they will have the issues of training and support for their own staff, never mind documentation.
    Considering this technology will make a debut in it's next gen release, it's not really all that much time to wait.
    It's plainly obvious what they are doing... prepare themselves in it's near entirety for the mass of users with xen related issues. This will show how professional they really are, and not just willing to jump on the bandwagon.

    New tech == new problems

    Nothing to see here, move along.

    --
    Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
  3. Pot. Kettle. Black. by Dammital · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That sounds a little hypocritical, seeing as it comes from the guys who, not so long ago, distributed an unstable and unsupported release ("2.96") of GCC with their product.

  4. Marketting... by Cyclops · · Score: 2, Insightful
    RHEL5 is still a few months away, and I believe that when he says...
    "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 means precisely to create the mindset that when RHEL5 comes out RedHat will have made Xen ready for enterprise use.

    I think they're trying to pour some "FUD" over current Xen distributions like, particularly, Novell's in order to make people wait for RH's version which will be "ready" :)
  5. Re:Pot. Kettle. Black. by Walles · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What they are doing now is the exact opposite of that.

    Then:
    * Let's ship this (gcc-2.96)!

    Now:
    * Let's not ship this (Xen).

    Maybe they have simply become wiser with the years?

    --
    Installed the Bubblemon yet?
  6. Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware by InsaneGeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It'd be hard for you to be more *WRONG*, Redhat has been pushing Xen for quite some time, last year our Redhat rep told us that they want to use Xen so bad that if it passes the muster in Fedora it might come out as an addon to RHEL 4.0. They specifically said to us that it was their intent to have their customers not use VMware anymore. It makes only sense, Redhat requires a license for each VM under VMware or Xen, if they can get 4x the revenue per physical box they'd be stupid not to push for it, rather than having companies try to get things to co-exist on the same install, get them to just pony up for another license. Don't try and mix your different web servers in the same install, just give them each their own instance. With VMware they'd only ever have a limited number of their installations in this extremely profitable position, with Xen every single customer could be possible targets.

    VMware datacenter product only supports the enterprise Suse & Redhat products (none of the non-enterprise products), while VMware workstation products support: Mandriva, Mandrake, Redhat, Suse, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, etc. VMware has two different products lines, and look there's Suse and Redhat with two different product lines too, the reason that VMware support those two surely can't be that Suse & Redhat product lines match with VMware product lines, and in can't be that VMware chose RHEL as it's console OS for ESX was because of Redhat's commitment to long lifespan, stability or that there are lots more 3rd party enterprise tools that are certified with it than any other distribution it has to be colusion between the two while they rub their hands together nefariously, that is the only reasonable explanation.