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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."

3 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. what is ready? by doktorjayd · · Score: 5, Interesting



    i run about 40-50 xen clients on a handful of moderate server hosts.

    perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT

    quickly reproducible, adjustable resourcing, and lets me give devs root acces on their own clients.

    i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'

    ----
    what, read the article? pfft.

  2. Keep one thing in mind by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This isn't a case of RedHat FUDing a competitor - RedHat is a Xen partner and thus has (some sort of) a vested interest in Xen succeeding.

    RedHat just doesn't yet feel that the time is right, but unlike other companies who like to FUD their competitors, RedHat wants the time to eventually become right so that they can comfortably include Xen into their products.

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  3. RedHat's Ties to VMware by GoRK · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This isn't really that much of a suprise. RedHat has some fairly deep ties into VMware. They are one of the only 'officially supported' Linux guest operating systems that VMware will run (of course it also runs everything else just fine). The VMware service console of ESX is based on RedHat, etc. They have a pretty good track record there, and I suppose that it is worth it from this standpoint to maintain the relationship. I also imagine that they get a kickback from VMware whenever ESX is sold since it basically includes RHEL3 -- either that or VMware is paying them a lot of money --

    FWIW, I agree with them on Xen even though I hate RedHat. Xen is a great performer and a very capable platform, but management is difficult and it is still lacking a lot of important features that VMware implements. This is part of the reason for the performance hit of VMware ESX vs Xen. When Xen gets up to a very equivalent feature level I think that you'd see the performance gap is going to be a lot smaller. In a hosting application or something when your company can afford the overhead of maintaining Xen -- go for it. If you are actually worried about maintaing the VM's and can't take the extra headache of being a Xen admin as well, go for ESX.