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

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.

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.

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?