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Novell Defends 'Unstable' Xen Claims
daria42 writes "Novell has fired back at Red Hat's claims that the open source Xen virtualization software is not yet ready for enterprise use. 'We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualization hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said "Yes, this technology's ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10."', Novell's chief technology officer said today. 'So I guess the other vendors would not do that if it weren't ready.'"
bah, fuck red hat.
xen rules, and will only get better with time. it's like 'mainframes for the masses'.
glad to see some corporation backing it up.
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be selective on who it makes friendship with"
My next systems will be based on either intel's virtualization or AMD's Pacifica. If the software isn't perfected yet, then it will be cleaned up soon enough to be tremendously useful to me. And that is what drives my dollars to a specific vendor.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Opening a portal to Xen could cause a resonance cascade.
Dr. Isaac Kleiner has been warning us about this for years.
liqbase
Besides Xen, a few other interesting tidbits appear in the article, but are missing from the summary (and, were also missing in the post on Digg... suspiciously).
1. All desktops in Novell have been using OpenOffice for a year now.
2. 80% of desktops in Novell now use Linux (I presume the remainder use Windows).
3. The article mentions some explanations for the recent personell changes in Novell. Not much content, though, just "we are in a different place now and need different people" (where have I heard that before).
See what happens when you have VPs snooping around the engineering cubes and trying to redeliver what they thought they heard.
Yeah... But does it run Linux??
Hey editors, the phrase you are looking for is "defends against claims" or "defends Xen stability"... it is RedHat who should be defending the claims of instability. The object of "to defend" is the thing you are protecting!
Muttering comment to self: why does English usage keep rotting out to the point where any short concise statement is often made 100% contrary to its intended meaning? If we have to decide everything by context and intuition, why not just have everybody say, "statistically appropriate speach act" as a placeholder? (Or "statistically inappropriate speach act" if we want to go with a nudge and a wink.)
Unfortunately we would then need a positive mod to balance it out, due to its over use.
+1 Zing?
"We don't feel that [Xen] is stable enough to address banking, telco, or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it."
Sure bub. I'll tell you something else; even Linux as a whole isn't ready for that yet. At this moment it is still impossible to guarantee that when I develop and deploy software on Linux it will keep on working out of the box the moment I skip, say, 3 update releases and simly copy the software over from this release to the upcoming version release. It is very likely that shit will break, take a look at BerkeleyDB for example; software developed for version 1 won't work with version 2.
Now look at the kernel itself where many kernel module developers simply gave up because the changes became too rapid and too drastic (some even complained about having to re-write their entire codebase's interface with every kernel release because too many things changed) and I think, as an Enterprise user/admin, that the conclusion is very simple. Don't get me wrong; Linux is getting there (at least thats what it looks like to me) but it has a long way to go still. These kind of discussions are in my opinion silly and draw away the focus from where it belongs.
Something about Chewbacca. And about the truthiness of big corporations when money is involved.
Well, Red Hat is right in some point: indeed, Xen won't work well with Red Hat systems.
/., I haven't touched Red Hat in >3 years. But if at the time it was the mother of all bloat, I doubt the situation has changed.)
But, no one said it's Xen's fault. It's just the fact that cramming ten virtual machines into a single system is not a good idea when the minimal install is 1.2GB like with Red Hat's latest offerings, crawling with memory-hungry daemons. I keep whining on Debian's mailing lists about unneeded cruft like inetd or portmap in the default system, as IMHO 100MB is way too bloated. And 100MB, is, well, a bit less than 1.2GB.
(Disclaimer: the figure of 1.2GB is something I vaguely remember reading about on
There is a similar case with Oracle. The default minimal install takes 800MB _RAM_ for a single instance, experienced DBAs claim you can go down as low as 300MB. MySQL is functional in 32MB, and shines in 64MB -- more memory is needed only if the dataset is big. For 34 databases on my old non-partitioned server there is only one over 100MB and three over 10MB -- I guess this is the typical distribution.
Neither Red Hat nor Oracle are capable of scaling down; Xen is worthless if you can't trim down your virtual machines.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Red Hat: "Is not!"
Novell: "Is too!"
Red Hat: "Is not, not, double not!"
Novell: "Is too, no backsies!"
More on this story as it develops.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Before you consider up-modding this post, grep it for "vagina" and similar words.
You realize all DOS was, was a boot partition for Netware. JHFC.
Seems odd that Novell would "Fire Back." Unix Shell, where I host my server, has had no end of troubles with Xen. Personally, I have been mostly stable, and the Xen technology is an awesome thing. However, the message on the front page of Unix Shell "Due to lack of Datacenter space, unixshell# has suspended ordering until further notice" is not entirely accurate. If you read the forums, they are waiting until Xen is stable enough to be able to deploy further accounts.
I Do C++
In my experience with it so far it is extremely stable and reliable and hell I am
even running it on a redhat platform....the guests are all ubuntu not sure about redhat
stability while running as a guest.
Got Code?
The implementations between OpenSUSE 10.1 and the new SLES are different, and neither work. In OpenSUSE, the scripts are wrong, leading to difficulties in getting GRUB to boot it. Go past that and we could only get two paravirtualizations to work concurrently, this on very seriously built hardware (Athlon 64 with 12GB DRAM at 3.2GHZ). We tried it on other servers in the shop and had similar problems. Occasionally, instances would go incommunicado-- that's right, living but deaf and dumb to the point where we had to scrape them because (we believe) the hypervisor lost its place.
No one we know has been able to get SUSE's version to work. It seems to be a branch of Xensource's work, but we can't get the source to try and hammer it out.
We're neither Red Hat or SUSE lackeys, but it would have been nice to have a kewl distro that allowed something beyond SELinux, which has its own heartburn problems.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
announcement
There must have been some issues.
Red Hat has been including it in Fedora for a bit now, and it works, and probably good enough for most companies, but in all seriousness, its not "enterprisey" at all and has its issues too, as all software does. Red Hat contributes to Xen, and their website has articles and I even believe videos about using Xen (things like migrating processes between two virtual machines and stuff), iirc. So they certainly like Xen, and have a vested interest in it, but it could use more work. Red Hat's enterprise line is pretty damn stable and you know you're getting quality stuff with it. Novell had no choice but to make this statement because they are supporting it with their latest release and can't have customers thinking they are getting a bad deal.
Regards,
Steve
You will know its stable code. The target was 6.1 and was missed. Xen is now a 'summer of code' project, so we'll see in 2 months how well it went.
Well I don't know about "small player" (like that has stoped linux distros before), the Debian community seems to want to detach itself from the linux one, hence why they call themselves GNU Debian Linux. I even hear that Debian might be moving to the GNU kernel (still in development) named "The Hurd". While Red Hat abandoned the thought of the casual linux user (still have unsuported copies of Red Hat 9.0 hanging around) and no I don't want the whole fedora thing. Red Hat hasn't produced anything innovative in years and shouldn't have made the comment about Xen in the first place when it has no alternative. Novell had an alliance with SCO with it's United Linux plan which would have been great to just unify all of the distrobutions and have some sort of standard. Nevell is also improving on SUSE Linux and Xen and has been a pioneer in the ability to add sound to the kernel (alsa anyone?). They help OpenOffice, created Beagle, Evolution, and even helped (majorly) with getting graphic card drivers to run on linux. They even created the ultra-cool compiz window manager and created XGL to run it. They are a very formidable company who is producing portable and very useful applications and Operating Systems to the public.
I don't think Novell needed to have any assistance acquiring SuSE. Novell has for many years thought that linux was the tool with which they could make inroads on the desktop market. Not only that, they had been firmly partnered with SuSE as they were another company that did much of their work in Germany. Not to mention their common goal of linux to the desktop.
Now to be critical of Novell. I have used SuSE both before, and after the Novell buyout. And to be honest I had much more confidence in their earlier systems stabilities. I manage quite a few linux boxen, and most are SuSE. (My boss is a Novell junkie to a fault.) My favorite boxes are inevitably the Debian-stable boxes. Yast is a foul stumbling block if you ask me. And I have had some trouble with features they say are ready for production. If the feature you want relys on a kernel module that is experimental then that feature, and/or your box will only be as stable as that module...No matter how much Novell insists otherwise. I will mention though that I have not found Xen to be an issue. It runs just as well as my patched vanilla kernels on other boxes.
This whole thing is all blown out of proportion, and is really no big deal at all. You have to keep in mind who Novell and Red Hat's customers are: companies that want vendor support. For whatever reason, one vendor has decided that it's profitable for them to support Xen, and one has decided that it's not.
That's all this is about. Maybe a tiny piece of the issue has to do with the maturity of Xen, but it just as easily could have to do with how much staff each company has on hand, what areas their support staff has expertise in, whether or not some internal leader/guru has had the time to get around to even looking at Xen much less evaluating it, etc. Red Hat saying Xen isn't ready (i.e. "we can't or don't want to support Xen") isn't any different than me saying MacOS isn't ready (i.e. "I can't or don't want to support MacOS, probably because I don't happen to have a Mac conveniently sitting around right now.").
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're doing some fat FUD, darling.
Red Hat contribution to linux : employing kernel developers like Alan Cox, is a major contributor to GCC/glibc, was the biggest contributor to Gnome after Ximian did nothing but Evolution and Red Carpet, both crappy unstable apps (Alan Cox wants to take Evolution out of Fedora Core). Red Hat bought, for big money, Sistina (GFS and LVM) and Netscape Directory Server and made them both free as in freedom. (that's really more important than the "we made Connector and YAST" free from Novell..)
Red Hat bought Cygnus, the developers of Cygwin. Cygwin is something any windows-locked user but with a unix background can't live without. Cygwin helps porting linux software to windows and have a real command line. Cygnus is also a major contributor to the GNU toolchain. Red Hat bought the opensource JBoss.
Red Hat is a major contributor, more than Novell. SuSE was a major contributor, like Red Hat, to things like Alsa, KDE, the kernel, X11 but Novell fired many SuSE employees and replaced them with Ximian stupid monkeys. Now all they are doing is stupid Eye Candy like XGL, the slow and bug ridden Beagle (i can say that to all the mono apps).. YOU SERIOUSLY THINK THAT'S MORE IMPORTANT THAN DIRECTORY SERVER, GFS, JBOSS, GCC AND ALL THE GNU TOOLCHAIN ?
"There is a similar case with Oracle. The default minimal install takes 800MB _RAM_ for a single instance, experienced DBAs claim you can go down as low as 300MB. MySQL is functional in 32MB, and shines in 64MB -- more memory is needed only if the dataset is big"
Well, this is blatantly incorrect. a new instance of Oracle 9ir2 takes up as much memory as you allocate to it. If you choose "percentage of available physical memory" and you have 512MB and set it to 50% then the instance will take roughly 256MB. You can set the SGA manually to whatever you want, but performance wont be that great depending on usage!
My dev. instance on XP Pro is 68Mb and I have several schemas that have datatfiles with 5GB in them - dataset size does not affect instance size, in Oracle at least, but I suppose that the poster may mean something else when referring to 'dataset'. I take it to mean 'the size of the data stored in the datafiles'. I know nothing about MySQL but would find it very strange if memory size was affected by dataset size...how much memory do you need then if the dataset is 1000TB?
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
So basically things should be assumed to be stable unless proven otherwise? That's generally not the way it works in the Debian world or the security world.
The key problem with Xen at this moment is that it's not in the mainline kernel and it's a nontrivial patch. Because of this, it's possible for Xen to break between kernel upgrades unless you put a lot of your own resources into QAing it and undoing any changes in the mainline kernel that damage Xen.
If you've been following the Ubuntu Edgy release, you'd see that originally Xen was planned to be supported out of the box in Edgy, but that changed when the Ubuntu-Xen team realized that Xen has problem in the kernel Ubuntu wants to ship (which has the most device drivers), so they'll scaled back the goal and support Xen as a "use at your own risk" less featureful but maintained Xen kernel. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenEdgy for details.
Also keep in mind that different people have different stability needs. Novell may be shipping Xen, but they're also shipping XGL which is usable (like Xen) and a very important feature (like Xen) but not entirely problem free (like Xen). The problems of Xen and XGL aren't unresolvable. XGL just needs a little burn in time to work out the kinks, and Xen needs to just get into the kernel. The paravirt_ops spec looks quite promising (http://lwn.net/Articles/191923/) and seems to be making a lot of progress.
Fedora and Ubuntu aren't currently shipping them (except as use at your own risk add-ons) and prefer to wait until the problems have been worked out.
But that's okay, they just want to make different tradeoffs than Novell has.
Linux is about choice, isn't it?
Xen is suitable for enterprise release? That's what they said about YAST...
I just tried to install Xen a few days ago. It completely killed by Linux install. I couldn't login at all. I had to do a complete reinstall. It also killed my bootloader during the install, so now I can't login to windows either. It was so bad, the people on mandrivausers.org thought my computer got hacked or something. But nope, when I re-ran the install, I got an error on the bootloader setup complaining about Xen, so....
If something will be the cause of linux never succeeding on the corporate desktop.. then it is this kind of 'infighting'. Sure they are competitors. But with the same base product (Linux distro + services). They have a partially shared goal. Without recognizing that, either a 3rd linux party will walk away with the clients, or linux will not be an option. Who wants a supplier that has nothing better to do than fighting it's own goals?
My memory must be going: I thought it was RH that was claiming that Xen was unstable and that Novell thought the opposite. So I start to read the summary... and after about ten seconds it dawns on me... the headline says exactly the opposite of the summary.
And to prove your point, your otherwise useful post was modded to -1.
Any post that is critical of slashdot "editors" or the mod ghods will be modded into oblivion and never seen. That's why slashdot the website is a joke. The fact remains - now as it ever was - for every slashdot story, 1/3 or more of the related posts are utter crap. The creators of slashdot want to hide that inconvenient fact, in order to sell more ad space. That's what the moderation system is for - to hide the fact that this entire site is a useless dung-heap, thereby increasing revenue generation from ads, so the slashdot weenies can sit on their fat useless asses, patting themselves on the back and earning their living by leeching off of other people's work.
And the fact that the parent post was marked as a troll proves it. Hey moderators, nice work showing your bias again and again and again.
Never used SusE/Novell's version of Xen, but I CAN tell you that Fedora's is not compiled with PAE enabled, so you cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. It seems to me, like you are looking for a pretty serious VM performance/memory allocation. I am in the same situation, and have to recompile Xen from source with PAE enabled to get more the kind of memory allocation that I need.
To save you some searching here's the make command
make XEN_TARGET_X86_PAE=y install
though for 64bit goodness you'll probably have to throw another flag in there.
I love the new SLED 10 as well as Open Suse 10.1, but in both cases the ZEN update service is the most unstable part of the distribution. When it works, it is a nice feature. However, it seems to have problems more often then it works.
I'm posting as Anonymous Coward because I am a coward who likes my anonymity (seriously.. it's true)
I run a hosting company. Nearly 12 months ago, we rolled out our first Xen installation, selling VMs to our customers.
Our Xen server's uptime is 333 days so far, and we have had a total of 0 problems. Absolutely nothing whatsoever has gone wrong in the last 333 days. We have 10 VMs running on a Dell 2850 with 2G of Ram - All the guest VMs are Debian.
How ready-for-enterprise do you want it. My company is entrprise. We are using it, we're selling VMs to paying enterprise customers and it's working and it's working beautifully.
Xen is soooo ready for prime-time.
Funnily enough, none of our servers run Redhat.
I agree completey, however, I'd just like to point out that Novell/SusE seems to be focusing more on the Desktop while RedHat is focusing more on the Server side. Personally, I feel that the server side is WAY more important, and gets "Linux" (in general) in the door and in the minds of the IT departments. The Desktop follows after that.
the Debian community seems to want to detach itself from the linux one, hence why they call themselves GNU Debian Linux
Lots of people refer to "Linux the operating system" (as opposed to "Linux the kernel") as GNU/Linux, as the GNU toolchain is such a hugely important part of the system that they feel that it deserves recognition. It has nothing to do with trying to distance themselves from "Linux the kernel".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Worse part is... the moderators are all of us slashdotters.
The moderators are Soylent...
I mean...
The moderators are people!
RedHat has always treated Dell as their key hardware vendor. My guess is that when RedHat says Xen isn't ready they mean that it is not idiot proofed enough to be pre-installed on a Dell and supported by Dell. My expierence has been that Dell started off as a reasonably competent OEM when it first started and has been going down hill since that. With the rate at which Dell support continues to get worse, I doubt the Xen developers will ever be able to put enough idiot proofing to counter Dell's inability to provide even moderate level support for Linux.
If you read between the lines Novell's statement, it is clear they feel the rest of the industry should not be held back by least common dominator quality support and that there are still competent hardware vendors (the example given being IBM, Intel and AMD) that exist that can support Xen as it exists today.
That's more important. If I had an Athlon-64 with 12 GiB of RAM, I'd much rather use 64-bit addressing to cleanly use the whole thing rather than segmentation games with chunks of 2, 3, or 4 GiB. (32-bit = 4 GiB; Linux uses...I think the top GiB for the kernel.)
... then the border worlds would be a LOT more stable. I mean geez, it's like the story of a lot of open source projects - one guy can make it, or totally break it. Thank god we've got the G-man around to keep things interesting. Well, him and the Vortigaunts.
Obvious shill? Shouldn't I be getting a check or something? Seriously, we have been running Xen on quad xeon boxes with CentOS in a testing environment for about a month now and have been very impressed. Sure, the initial build and config were a pain, but it looks like it's going to cut down on the amount of hardware we are going to have to deploy and support. I am disappointed but not surprised that since my opinion doesn't jibe with yours that, in your opinion, I must be a shill but hey, no skin off my nose.
I've been using Xen for a while now (Slackware dom0), and its been just fine. In fact, its been ace. Now I can have 4 servers running on one, and even migrate legacy software onto new hardware. Xen r0x0rz my s0x0rz.
It possible that they're both right. That xen is stable enough for Novell but not for Red Hat.
That isn't a shot a Novell, the two companies just have customers that expect a different balance with regards to price, support, and stability, if you look at the market Red Hat is really trying to position itself as having stability and support on par with traditional Unix vendors (such as Sun) while Novell is looking to a lot of the businesses who would find Red Hat's offering too pricey. A xen install that is stable enough for Novell customers may not be sufficient for Red Hat customers.
I stole this Sig
Ever since the resonance cascade failure at Black Mesa, Xen has never been very stable
Red Hat said that it was not good enough for banking, telco, or other enterprise use. In general, virtualization offers some advantages where you have non- or semi-critical services that are on servers that you want to consolidate. I think there are also a few potential security applications I would consider too.
I would not consider using it for telecom switches or the like.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
news for you: Oracle don't ship RPMs (and all they customers (HAVE to) let)!