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

US-based startup?

[TheRaven64]

From TFA:

Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource

Looking at the XenSource web site, they have three offices, two in the US and one in the UK. Considering that they are a spin out from Cambridge University (in the UK), developing software originating in Cambridge University, calling them US-based seems highly misleading.

Of course its unstable

[LiquidCoooled]

Opening a portal to Xen could cause a resonance cascade.

Dr. Isaac Kleiner has been warning us about this for years.

Summary is incomplete

[kripkenstein]

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).

Re:Summary is incomplete

[TheRaven64]

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.

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

[walt-sjc]

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.

Re:Red Hat's fault

[KiloByte]

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

Press conference at the schoolyard

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Seems Odd...

[lefticus]

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 agree with them

[codepunk]

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.

Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely works.

[postbigbang]

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.

Xen is in (Red Hat's) Fedora Core 6 Test 2

[hey]

announcement
There must have been some issues.

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:Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely wor

[IMightB]

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.