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.'"

Comments

Senior VPs should not be allowed off their leashes

[flipper65]

While it pains me to say anything good about Novell in their current incarnation, Xen absolutely rocks. What RedHat's mouthy VP should have said, and could have reasonably said is: "WE have not fully tested Xen and WE are not ready to support it in the enterprise." That is a completely reasonable statement and probably better reflects reality.

See what happens when you have VPs snooping around the engineering cubes and trying to redeliver what they thought they heard.

Editing the headline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Red Hat's fault

[KiloByte]

Well, Red Hat is right in some point: indeed, Xen won't work well with Red Hat systems.

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 /., 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.)

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.

Re:Red Hat's fault

[vadim_t]

But we're talking about the default system here. inetd isn't required to boot the system, and you can perfectly have a fully functional system without it. That's not to say that it shouldn't be present, just that it shouldn't be installed until you install something that depends on it. Same for portmap.

This is all no big deal

[Sloppy]

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.").

Predictable

[__aahlyu4518]

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?

Re:Predictable

[TheRaven64]

But with the same base product (Linux distro + services). They have a partially shared goal.

I don't know what leads you to believe this. Novell's aim is to make as many people as possible run Novell's OS. Red Hat's aim is to make as many people as possible run Red Hat's OS. The fact that these have some common components is irrelevant. OS X uses bash, gcc and Apache; does this mean that Apple also has a partially shared goal with Red Hat and Novell? Microsoft Windows includes some 4.4BSD code, and so do Linux and OS X. Does this mean that Microsoft, Apple, Novell and Red Hat partially share a goal?

Well, actually, they all do partially share a goal; owning the corporate desktop market. Why you think this would make them co-operative, however, is beyond me.

It gets better....

[T-Ranger]

Initially a Windows software company, Novell turned to Linux-based software when it completed the acquisition of SUSE Linux in 2004.

<nelson>Ha, hUh?</nelson> Novell was, if anything, initially a hardware company. OK, that Novell dosent count, Novell was initially network OS company (Netware), that supported primarily DOS! Ok, that doesnt count either: Novell was a focused on enterprise network services, with integrated directory services backed management. OK, no one knows what that means: Novell was focused on identity, asset, file and print, software and configuration services and management. Begining in the early 2000's, porting their products to both run on, and manage, linux systems, Novell entered the market full force when they aquired SUSE ..... But a Windows software company? WHAT IN THE FUCK?

Re:who cares about red hat?

[real_b0fh]

hehe mods here are real pieces of work.

anyway, xen is an amazing tool to build a poor man's mainframe if you will use the OSes that have been hacked to run on it (linux, bsd, plan9...). With this new 'vt' technologies being put out by intel and amd, it will even be able to run windows (and anything that runs on a x86) without hacks.

altough it is hardly 'innovation' (ibm has done this stuff like, forever), mad pr0pz to the xen guys for bringing this to the mundane x86 world.