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Oracle 'Losing Patience' with XenSource, VMware
HiTech writes "eWeek has an article looking at Oracle's frustration with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together. The goal is to develop a single interface for virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel. Oracle's comments follow those by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman at Oscon last week that XenSource and VMware were butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution. Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of products and alliances, admits the company had been approached by a neutral third party for offline mediation to establish how best to make this happen. But Simon Crosby, the CTO for XenSource, rules out any mediation, saying he believes the two companies are committed to solving the real technical issues."
Getting the two companies to talk to one another and work together has been requiring mediation by neutral parties
Seriously people, this is computer software we're talking about, not Israel and Hezbollah. I think they can come to a compromise pretty soon here.
Oracle's interoperability with competing products is perfect. Yeesh.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I wish someone would get Xen and VMWare to work together for a single virtualization interface. Then they might be able to talk some sense into Oracle so there's a single SQL interface regardless of which SQL vendor or server or version or driver or language or OS...
--
make install -not war
VMWare has a business to protect. XenSource does not.
Ahem... "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(TM) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology. [...] XenSource is backed by leading venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sevin Rosen Funds, Accel Partners, and New Enterprise Associates."
The Reg is leading with a story putting meat on the bones of the contention in the article that Xen is *not ready for prime-time*.
It will be interesting to see who's chumming, who's fishing and who's cutting bait when this boat comes in. Is it possible VMWare is trolling Oracle for an offer, playing hardball like this?
illegitimii non ingravare
I don't think that is the position of the granparent. I believe it is more on the line of "If you aren't open, then don't pretend to be open. Opening up the minimum of resources, just to appear in the headlines is not fooling anyone".
I don't like this atitude of labeling stuff as evil and good. This tends to misrepresent almost everithing, google is good, sure what about all those secrets and the censorship in china (I actualy don't think that this is google's fault but many people think it is). MS is evil to root, but many people use their software and like it (it's not for me, but who am I to say what's best for everyone?). And so it goes, up to the infamous Bush's "axis of evil" that aparently if you classify to this group then it's okay if you are arrested and sent to Cuba to be tortured.
Come on people there are shades of gray, and even shades of yellow, green, blue and other colors. There are many sides, many ways to see the same fact, and many time what seems pure black from one of those sides can be clear as whater in other point of view.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Well, that's kind of to be expected: when you get right down to it, the whole premise of Linux was a reinvention of the wheel. It's a clone of an operating system that already existed -- it doesn't get much more re-inventive than that.
However, if there's anything we can learn from that, it's that sometimes there are benefits to re-inventing something that already exists, and in some cases may already seem to work okay. What seems like a complete waste of time to one person might create a result that's just different enough in some way to be really useful to somebody. (In the case of Linux, to a lot of us anyway, it was Unix but without the high cost and crappy licensing, and with the ability to see the source; hugely significant to some people but I'm sure it looked totally redundant to Unix people.)
Sometimes reinvention is necessary. You make a good point though, that there does seem to be a lot of it going on at any given time, and maybe that doesn't need to be the case here -- in any event, it seems like the reasons for taking parallel roads to the same place rather than working together should be carefully considered.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Simon can complain all he wants, but we've had profound difficulties making their virtualization scheme work. It looks so tasty on paper, and yet Xen-modified kernels are unstable and feeble.
The VMWare pressure, however, doesn't help. EMC/VMWare has a killer cadre of coders. They're very good and well paid, and can shift quickly to keep ahead of the market. Yes, it's largely NOT free open source software. Ok, it's free in some cases, but not OSS.
Am I asking them not to beat up on Xen? Yes. It still needs to cook before it's going to be ready for prime time use. Until then, it's premature.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I'll re-ask the question I asked the panel at VEE this year:
VMMs were created, in part because Operating Systems were unstable, incompatible, and often too big. Now we have all these VMMs that are unstable, incompatible, and trying to to more and more. So the question is:
(1) What has the VMM community learned from the OS community, and
(2) Why should I believe that we're going to get right this time?
no comment
Actually VMware suggested a documented, standardized, gernal interface that would allow closed-source binaries to talk to it. Xen want's an interface that is specific to Xen, that only Xen could use, effectively closing VMware and anyone else who would want to do virtualization that is any different than Xen from being in the kernel. If you believe that nobody could ever create a product better than Xen or if you believe that Xen will always have all the possible features that you could ever want in a hypervisor than you should support Xen specific patches in the kernel rather than a general interface.
No, it does not.
/var/vmware/) and you're pretty much off. It took me longer and was more of a PITA to install Windows on the resulting VM than it was to install VMWare itself.
I've set up VMWare Server (which is FAIB) on my Kubuntu Dapper system and it was quite easy. Basically you just follow the instructions, I didn't run into any major installation gotchas. You register with VMWare and they email you a serial number and a link to the download site; you run the installer and choose where you want things to be installed (I use
Only thing I ran into though: be careful of the networking option that you choose. The default is 'Bridged,' which creates a virtual interface using your machine's same network card, which then gets a DHCP address from your LAN router. This is nice because it means your virtual machine doesn't use the same IP as your host machine's native OS. This caused me some problems with services that I had running on the host, netatalk in particular. (The default configuration of netatalk is to try to automatically find the correct network interface, and it got confused by the virtual one apparently; explicitly defining which one to use solved the problem.)
Long story short: consider using the 'NAT' networking option until you know what you're doing; this does IP masquerading so that the VM uses your machine's regular network interface and IP address. It means there's an extra layer of NAT to punch through if you wanted to run services on the VM, but it keeps most of the complexity hidden inside VMWare.
After you get VMWare installed, you can either create a bare virtual hard disk and install whichever x86 OS you want, or you can download pre-configured virtual machines; I don't know if Edgy is one of these, but it might be.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Good point, you are right and newer processors, both Intel and AMD, support virtualization natively. With one of these processors, you can run Windows under Xen. The common interface is needed because 99.5% of processors out there do not support native virtualization.
And if you think getting them to agree on a Linux kernel interface is hard, just try getting them to agree to a common image format. It's not gonna happen.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You're kidding, right? This is computer software, the battleground of OCPD personalities, where one aspect is taken out of context and used to judge something into "perfect" and "complete evil" categories, with no middle ground. And then proceed to try to raise a crusade to death against the complete evil ones. It's the place where vi vs emacs, KDE vs Gnome, Java vs C++, Intel vs AMD, goto vs for/while loops, and of course OSS vs anything else isn't just worth a debate, but become religious wars and things to fight to death for or against.
I bet that when your stereotypical ultra-militant extremist-Islamist organization's meetings go out of hands, someone could interject "stop it guys, you're starting to sound like on the OpenBSD mailing lists." And, assuming they've even heard of OpenBSD, the previously screaming and fist-shaking speakers would blush and start staring at their own shoes in silence.
In fact, if the Hesbolah vs Israel _were_ like the software holy wars, God help us, because there's be no possibility of peace ever. I could just see a peace talks turning into "ok, you may have aggreed to free Palestine, pay reparations, change your language to Arabic, convert to Islamic faith, recognize the Ayatolah's authority and everything... but... YOU RUN YOUR SERVERS ON WINDOWS! DIE INFIDEL!!!"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
VMware went to OLS and presented a paper demonstrating a VMI interface that runs either Xen or VMware at the same speed as the Xen interface. Xen has never tried to run on a VMware hypervisor, but XenSource went and signed a deal to run on the (future) Windows hypervisor. My opinion is that Xen is a bunch of hypocrites: they complain about how VMware isn't open, then go sign a deal with the least open company of all. Of course, I'm biased.
Xen wants VMware to adopt the Xen hypervisor interface. This is impossible. The Xen interface is too tightly coupled to the Xen hypervisor; it's missing pieces that are necessary to run the VMware hypervisor at reasonable performance. VMware doesn't really care which interface actually proliferates (as in, there will be a layer of interface glue regardless), so long as the interface is good enough. Xen's interface is not good enough. As of two weeks ago, Xen and VMI were the only two interfaces out there.
Greg K-H's gripe with VMware is that the kernel module isn't open source. Yes and no (I don't want to argue - the code is open but not GPLed), the point is that he's spending more time complaining about Xen and VMware than it would take to actually mediate the problem. (Which, thankfully, someone else is doing instead, with paravirt_ops).
Finally: I saw more pot-shots about being unable to benchmark VMware in the original article. That changed several months ago, benchmarks are now allowed by EULA. Certain companies ought to stop spreading FUD...
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire