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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."
> 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
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'
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what, read the article? pfft.
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.
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"
Was I the only one to think that the article's about Xen not yet ready to be used as a relay for teleportation from City 17 to Black Mesa East? :-)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
Xen support has been in Fedora for a few cores now. They were the first distro with support for Xen. Red Hat has given a lot of help to Xen. So maybe this statement by them should be taken more seriously than most in this thread are. Red Hat has a vested interest in Xen working, and working well.
Regards,
Steve
So Xen isn't ready for "prime time" yet. Yawn. So what? It's a software kludge that gives low-end (read: "x86") servers a subset of the partitioning capabilities that IBM's Power processors have had for years.
If you want mission-critical reliability, you should be running hardware that is mission-critical reliable. Hint: that ain't Intel.
Spend a little more, get a p-series server, partition it as many ways as you like (actually, I think you're limited to 32 partitions), and run a different OS on each one, if you like. You can run Linux, you can run AIX, you can run all kinds of stuff. You got your virtualization, you got your management tools, it's proven technology, and it runs in hardware.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll