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Novell Defends 'Unstable' Xen Claims

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-to-go dept.

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.'"

8 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Summary is incomplete by kripkenstein · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:Summary is incomplete by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative
      All desktops in Novell have been using OpenOffice for a year now.

      This is very important. Novell is the second largest contributor to OO.o (behind Sun, who still do about 80% of the work). Unlike Sun, however, Novell is primarily working on dogfooding issues. People within their organisation say 'I need this feature,' and they implement it. Better VBA support, for example, is a Novell focus area. They also work a lot on the UI and are responsible for the new build system (I'm not sure if that's in the trunk yet) that makes it much easier for new developers to get involved.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:Red Hat's fault by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Informative

    the fact that cramming ten virtual machines into a single system is not a good idea when the minimal install is 1.2GB

    Um, considering that in VM situations, most of that 1.2G can be in a shared read-only partition (or an LVM2 RW snapshot), and that modern hard drives are quite large, I respectfully disagree.

    See the LVM HOWTO which SPECIFICALLY mentions XEN as an applcaion of RW snapshots.

  3. Seems Odd... by lefticus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    I Do C++
  4. I agree with them by codepunk · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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  5. Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely works. by postbigbang · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  6. Re:Red Hat's fault by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Informative
    Um, considering that in VM situations, most of that 1.2G can be in a shared read-only partition (or an LVM2 RW snapshot), and that modern hard drives are quite large, I respectfully disagree.
    And what if you want to add a package to only one of the VMs?

    I put things into separate Xen domains nearly only for security. Having potentially vulnerable crap like php or python on only a single VM means that only that single VM will be endangered when a new hole is discovered. And when you don't have even things like wget installed, most attackers who pwn you will move to an easier target. Not to mention that I would want to see the face of that script kiddie once he notices the box has only IPv6 connectivity :p

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  7. Re:Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely wor by IMightB · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.