Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Janus
nadador
writes "Apparently, Microsoft is readying an enterprise
class clustering and failover version of Windows 2000.
Techweb, and Microsoft, I'm sure, seem to think this is
going to be a "Unix Killer". It also mentions Linux as a
driving force in making Windows truly enterprise class
software" It actually sounds quite impressive. I can't wait
to see what some of the upcoming HA (high-availability) enhancements for Linux
will look like.
Whether NT is stable in a single server non-HA configuration or not does not matter; as long as the system as viewed from outside the cluster is up all the time with acceptable performance, there is no loss. Linux can do HA too, but the apps just aren't there. We can't beat this because we don't have control over it. Stability is really the only thing Linux has over NT at the moment in the data center, but this turns the tables. NT with failover clusters is more reliable than any single Linux machine.
Have Oracle port OPS. Oh, wait, that won't be done until raw devices are in the kernel, and Linus doesn't like them. Same for other cluster-enabled RDBMSs. Linux also has a severe filesystem deficiency right now, but as I understand it, this is being worked on, but I don't see much real progress. Other scalability concerns are being addressed in 2.3 right now, which should be out before 2000 as 2.4, if I am to understand Linus's release schedule correctly.
Another real problem with Linux is the lack of availablity of midrange and high-end hardware to key developers. My company (Denarius: http://www.denarius.com) would be more than happy to supply and set up access to high-end hardware for kernel developers as a service to the community. Hardware manufacturers would have an incentive to offer evaluations of their hardware to "sponsor" the project, as well, gaining bonus points with developers and users.
I will never use NT again
... geekboy"
I hoped on a NT machine once to port some C shell scripts into NT compatiable perl. (Was not my idea). Grabed Active perl, it installed easy, sweet I though, NT isn't so bad, I take a quick look at the code of the shell scripts, pop open edit and start to port away. 5-10-15 minutes go by, hey this isn't so bad, "NT is kinda nice" I though to myself.
BANG!! "WTF?" I think, shake shake, "Hrm."
Edit locked the system up tight. ctrl-alt-del, no good. I walk down the half and jump into the break room, 7 MSCE standing around, "Ok, no problem"
"Hey can one of you guys help me out, one of the NT machines in there isn't working right"
"Ohhh does the little unix geek have problem working with the Big Scary NT machines"
"Ha ha guys, come on help me getting this back to a normal state"
"Maybe if you didn't use a OS from before you where born you would have a couple minutes to learn a real OS like NT
"Will you help me or not"
They piled into look at how stupid I was, "look he doesn't know how to use a mouse" things like that. After 2 minutes of clicking on the keyboard and messing with the mouse one of em turns to me and 'speaking down" to me said "Look this is a power button, you push it in the machine goes off, you push it in again and the machine come on, ok do you think you can handle that?" and he fliped the power switch.
"Why didn't you just kill the process" I said
"Maybe if you didn't keep crashing it we wouldn't be in this mess"
After 3 hours of edit.com crashing 12 differant NT machine multiply times and 7 MSCE that couldn't firgure it out with help from Mirosoft Techo Support. If they can't get a small text editor to work on standard machine with $4000 tech support agreement with Microsoft, I have to take a stand and say "I will NEVER use NT again!"
I agree wholeheartedly. Frankly, I didn't see what was so amusing about his 2 bits, at all. The language was incredibly stilted, and the humor, wasn't funny. It was your basic "MS Sucks" piece, with delusions of grandeur.
I appreciate that most of the readers of this site, are rabid about Linux. But c'mon people. This "humor" site, was just juvenille.
If the users of Linux can't keep the dialogue at a vaguely sophisticated level, they WILL continue to be ridiculed, and ignored. If you want to be taken seriously, you guys should at least occasionally feign maturity.
Ok, I'm back off my soapbox now.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Actually, this quote isn't by the author of the article but is attributed to "One VAR". It's the Anonymous Coward of journalism, in this case probably someone who has an interest in Linux being seen as a toy OS. This article wasn't so much written as pieced together out of quotes from Microsoft and mostly unidentified industry sources.
And this is all really going to ship 60-120 days after the release of Win2k? Most customers will still be waiting for the first Win2k Service Pack at that point, as explained at the end of the article. Janus sounds like the same old vaporware to me.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Here I prooves that Micorsoft is really really very very good: http://www.freeyellow.com/members7 /geraldholmes/index.html
I was one of the principal designers and implementors of both the cluster manager and lock manager for HACMP/6000 version 3.1 (which, BTW, supported 8-way symmetric failover) back in '94, so maybe I'm qualified to comment on some of this.
;-) MS has so far exhibited nothing but the most startling ignorance and incompetence in these areas so far, and the idea that they'll suddenly leapfrog the established experts like this is just bunk. It's far easier to believe that they're deliberately making false claims to scare off the competition...again.
First, about MS. The consensus opinion among people who really know HA is that Wolfpack was and is the most pathetic piece of junk ever. The prevailing theory is that they quite deliberately announced it knowing that it was junk, to scare off anyone (such as my employer at the time) who might try to produce their own NT HA solutions.
This Janus project is just another step in that direction. 64 or 256 nodes? Yeah right. There are several reasons other HA solutions typically only go up to eight. The main one is that nobody really wants a single cluster that big. It's a total management nightmare. What customers actually want to do is set up multiple independent clusters of a reasonable size, and perhaps manage them all from within a common framework, but that's not the same as a single cluster. There's just no benefit to offset the cost of setting up failover relationships that deep and complex.
Another reason you don't see HA clusters beyond eight is that it's all but impossible to devise protocols (membership, hearbeat, consensus, and so on) that scale that high and yet still handle the simple cases efficiently. Just avoiding all the race conditions in eight nodes booting and trying to join the cluster at once is incredibly difficult. If you don't think it's that hard, try it. Have fun. Come back after you've failed, and we'll talk.
Now that I've bashed MS HA, a few words about Linux HA. It's as pathetic as MS. We have some very basic heartbeat code, and a few other scattered bits and pieces, but that's it. There's practically no fault identification to distinguish different types of failures so that one can respond differently to an adapter or network failure as distinct from a node failure. There's no lock manager. Many of the people working on the designs are only beginning to grasp the basic problems, and they're months if not years from actually implementing industrial-strength solutions. I'm on the mailing list (or I was, before I moved and had to give up my cable-modem account), I see the traffic, and it's Just Not There. I'm sorry, and I wish I could spare more time to contribute more of my own hard-won experience to the project, but that's just the way things are.
jdarcy@emc.com, until I get a new home account
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
"Why can't you people even wait until the product comes out to bash it!?!?"
/. for interesting news & for links to Linux & Unix resources, as I am learning Solaris & Linux administration.
/. for very long. Most of the IS pros here do just that, _when_ they are allowed to - but often they are forced to use inferior (for their purposes) products. They don't like them, so they bitch.
Because, historically, M$ has been all about vaporware as a way to discourage competition. As far as bashing, I see no reason why anyone would spend the amount of $$ needed for an HA system from a company that has always claimed, but never delivered real stability.
What's _not_ to bash?
"You would expect the slashdot netizens to be at least a little intelligent and open minded... but alas, you all are a discredit to your OS."
Fuck you too.
At work I am the primary NT admin for my company.
My primary (at home) OS is MacOS 8 - I read
"I looked at the white papers, and it sounds DAMN cool. Yet most of you imediatly start bashing NT... which is completely besides
the point."
How is it besides the point? NT sucks for high-availability applications, Win2K is just another version of it, with even more M$ FUD to bolster it's market position.
"Stop bashing and start looking for the best solution to your IT problems... don't use a product simply because of who does, or does
not make it."
Obviously, you haven't been reading
"I don't know about you, but I use something because it's the best... not because MS does or doesn't make it."
Which is why I use a Mac at home for the majority of my personal work (I can hear the flamethrowers ramping up now...).
"Get a life..."
Get a _clue_.
Or do you think they will borrow the hotkey virtual console feature of linux so you can switch between the bluescreens to jot down the hex codes before you go off into MSDN? -Justin
Actually, Linux does have failover capability already. There is a Linux HA project currently in progress. Here's a few quick links that I pulled out of freshmeat:
3 572853.html
Linux-HA:
http://www.henge.com/~alanr/ha/
failoverd:
http://www.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/04/08/92
Heart:
http://www.lemuria.org/Heart/
æeee!
Actually I think it is quite reasonable to expect the slashdot community to "bash" new versions of Microsoft OSes before they are released. Microsoft has never completely fullfilled their promises of any of their OS releases, why should we expect this one to be any more?
I don't buy (or get for free) a product for my IS dept based on who makes it either, thank you. I choose based on many factors, including performance and stability, ease of maintence, and very importantly cost. That last catagory NT 2000 Enterprise clearly falls far short of Linux, even if it does live up to the expectations set forth in the "white papers", and even *equal* the performance and stability of linux. I think you need to get a life and evaluate your options before you spend $1k+ on each installation of a server OS, and even more upgrading a server to meet its requirements.
Spyky
Here's a discussion of the Greek Mythology of Janus. Basically he's the god of beginnings, doorways, etc.. Interestingly, he's represented with two faces.... imagine that, M$ being two-faced...
My guess is, with this new "Janus" product, Windows will finally be stable enough to have uptimes that rival those of Unix systems. Of course, you have to have several machines to accomplish this, and the average company isn't going to have the money to buy the hardware, and from Microsoft's way of pricing, they won't have the money to buy the software.
Its a shame, really, that Unix and Linux have to be so good, since so many admin's need NT to "do it all for them with a wizard".
> Linux today is a toy techies play with
Taking this out of context, I'd say Linux Today is a Linux news site...
But in context, I'd say that if Linux is a toy, why are companies like IBM and Oracle investing time and money in it?
> Microsoft officials could not be reached for further comment.
Are we suprised?
You know the answer.
Anything that makes any OS better is a good thing. I know ill probably get "moderated" down for saying this, but I don't think Windows/NT is bad because its closed source, its bad because they haven't had much competition, and because of the way they use their software as a tool to make the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Huser buy more MICROS~1 products.
Anything (such as linux enterprise servers) that puts pressure on them to improve their product is good.
Chomp chomp. Pardon me - I'm trying to eat my words. This is where I retract some/most of what I said before. OK linux is working towards HA, but doesn't seem to have any fully functional right now (from a quick read of those links). And neither does M$.
But I kinda have some questions. My concepts of HA might be slightly odd, but...
These seem to use IP faking for failover. My understanding was that true HA somehow had shared memory resources and if a machine died you didn't loose anything. But I could be imagining things again.
OK silly thought of the day - can you have RAID machines? Work with me. Instead of disks, have machines, RAIM. So have like X+2 machines, X working, 1 doing CRC and 1 as um hot spare. Could you do HA this way? Sorry like I said its the silly thought du jour. I do not have enough knowledge to know weather this is even viable, let alone code-able
-cpd
For feature rich, high-end systems, there are excellent commercial UNIX systems out there, priced at a fraction of the cost of the hardware needed to run them. Even if NT could compete feature-by-feature with those, it doesn't run on the high-end hardware (yet?).
The neat thing about Linux is that it is part of the UNIX/POSIX family of operating systems, a family that spans everything from small embedded systems to the largest scientific supercomputers and mainframes. While those systems aren't 100% compatible, it's pretty easy to port source code among them.
Microsoft seems to be trying to duplicate this with Windows APIs from WinCE to NT. But I think their range of platforms is much smaller than POSIX, and the interoperability of their own APIs among different platforms is much worse. If they want to play in this market, they have to document their APIs much more carefully and live with third party implementations.