KVM is part of the default Linux kernel now, and Xen isn't
Um, that's not strictly true. The domU Xen Code is already in the mainline kernel, and there's been some recent discussion to include dom0 as well. Based on a recent LWN article ( Xen: finishing the job ) I'd say there's a very good chance that will happen.
Or, to look at it another way, KVM is behind the tech curve, and has a ways to go to catch up.
I used to work on Tru64 Unix on Alpha, back in the day when it was (arguably) the best platform amongst its peers. Certainly the Alpha chip was. What I learned from that experience is that where business and money is involved, the best technical solutions are not always the winners. That said, the fact that all of KVM is part of the core Linux kernel now means that it will benefit from constant and continuous development and improvement. So I fully anticipate that it will eclipse Xen at some point in the relatively near future, which is why I personally am paying a lot more attention to it than I have in recent years.
All in all, it's just better to go with a vendor which is more committed to your requirements
Agreed, and as SuSE Novel have thrown their weight behind Xen, that would appear to be the distro of choice for you.
You miss the point. Which is that RH is not claiming that Xen will be supported beyond RH5. Can you show me one statement where it's going to be supported in RH6?
Um, no I'm not missing the point. I know they're not claiming it's going to be supported in RH6, which I understand to mean that it won't be. But it will be supported in RH 5.{7,8,9} or whatever the release is in 5 years time. And 5 years is an age in this business.
It's just not going to work, and it will cost them customers who need a commitment beyond RHEL5
I don't think so. Businesses implementing new builds today will be looking for a technology refresh 5 years from now, and by then I fully expect Redhat to have proven tools at their disposal that can import/convert Xen VMs into KVM VMs in the same way that VMware can import Parallels VMs now. There will be a migration path.
What gets me are those that believe in #1 and also think that they can use events in the bible to back-track the creation of the earth to less than 10,000 years: like Texas school board chairman Dr Don McLeroy in the article.
If the bible were without error and free of contradiction, then the genesis story of creation would be true: and thus the earth was created before the stars, as that's the order of events genesis describes.
Given that we know the speed of light and are able to calculate that light from far away cosmic events witnessed today have taken billions of years to get here, how do people like McLeroy explain that one! If that isn't a contradiction, I don't know what is.
Given that the person from Redhat said that Xen will be supported in RHEL till 2014, and the information you posted says that Xen will be supported for the lifetime of RHEL 5: one can draw the conclusion that the person from Redhat is right because RHEL 5.n will be supported for that long.
KVM is great and all, but I'm sure Redhat don't expect customers to dump Xen until they've had a decent return on their investment. Redhat are not dumb.
I happen to agree with Ted and yourself from a technical stand point. But where Ted stuffed up is that from ext3 to ext4 he moved the goal posts and didn't communicate effectively to the community what effect this would have. Nor did he explore before hand the consequences of moving said goal posts on software widely in use. He's since done the right thing, which is to give people a choice; and the public fall out from all this has done the communication for him. But he could have saved himself a public ear bashing if he'd gone about this differently. Hopefully he'll remember this next time.
Oh, and trust me, big companies want the official paid support - so that basically means Novell or Redhat
Or Oracle: if you're rolling out a lot of 11g databases or going with a RAC cluster; as Oracle Enterprise Linux = Redhat = CentOS, plus a few extras like OCFS2 packaged with it.
Canonical with Ubuntu Server could yet be a force to be reckoned with as it matures, if the support price is competitive with the other guys. The real trick though is to get Ubuntu Server certified by all the big hardware vendors for use on all their x86(-64) product lines. That's what will open the door to commercial sales and lead to more support contracts.
You've pretty much summed up many of the challenges Linux desktop distributions have to overcome to be in a fit state to pitch for a place on the desktop of most corporations. And while many of the tools to do some of these reside on isolated islands of innovation, there is no unifying management interface. A detailed description of how to do all this would probably be enough material to put in a book.
Here are some little gems you might want to check out:
You'll want to keep an eye on freeIPA. When it hits V2 it'll become very useful to you.
The CODA Filesystem is the only one I know of that provides disconnected operation for mobile computing.
And I'll throw my weight behind Nomachine NX too. Definitely the best MSTCS equivalent in the Linux space.
Nice solution if you want all users of a workstation to be tied to the same environment. But I believe what the Parent wants is a mechanism where by different users can login to any system and their personal environment and "system view" follow them around where ever they go and can be setup and controlled from a central place. i.e. one user might have a "profile" where the Preferences menu isn't visible, their web browser uses proxy a.b.c and they have a number of network shares mounted for them. Where as another user has full access to Preferences, uses proxy d.e.f and has no shares visible. On Windows this seems pretty trivial to set up (I'm not an expert). But on *ix it isn't: at least not without lots of bespoke (probably unsupportable) scripting to glue tools together that could do the same.
And you need to keep an eye on where you started arguing from and stop trying to twist other peoples words to get out of a loosing position. No one is disputing Apple is happy in their niche position, and that's not what this argument is about.
You started all this by criticizing Apple for refusing to license their OS and directly tied that to the reason why Apple doesn't threaten MS. This infers YOU believe they should license their OS and by association, that they should actively try and threaten MS.
You are wrong. As I have explained to you: that is not going to happen because it doesn't fit Apple's profitable, niche, business model. You know, the one you agree Apple is happy being in.
Apple has accepted it's position in a niche, and isn't going to get out of it. As such, MS has absolutely nothing to fear from them.
Note though that many other things were killing Apple at the time, and the OS they licensed was terrible. You can't reasonably conclude that they couldn't do better now that they have a decent OS.
You don't get it. Apple's primary goal is to be profitable, very profitable: and they're succeeding very well. They are not chasing after the prize of being the dominant software provider, and aren't going to because YOU want them to. They're the no: 2 desktop OS in the world, and they're happy with that.
Note though that many other things were killing Apple at the time
Like what?
You can't reasonably conclude that they couldn't do better now that they have a decent OS.
Again, you show a complete (naive) lack of understanding WRT Apple's business model. If Apple suddenly went from ~3M OS X sales a quarter to ~30M sales a quarter, then they would also have to pull ~30M worth of hardware manufacturing capability out of their ass, and they just don't have that. If they broke their business model and loosed OS X on the work free from hardware encumbrance, then they would loose control of holistic Apple: that very thing that defines the Apple experience. They would be competing on Dell, HP and IBM kit, against the likes of MS Windows and Linux. They could mot compete on price using their own hardware: it would be a financial and marketing disaster.
Personally I put my trust in Apple to know what's best for Apple's business. Not Rix !
My wife and I have just been to see it. Neither of us have read the comic books or knew the characters at all. We both really enjoyed it. Her comments: "Not your typical super-hero film", and neither of us guessed the baddie until he was revealed. Definitely one for the DVD list.
and they screwed up in failing to anticipate the Netbook and not being flexible enough to shift to it quickly
I agreed with everything you said up to this point. The Netbooks are turning out not to be so great for business for those that have them in a portfolio with bigger and more profitable models. One of the reasons some vendors have seen big drops in their laptop sales recently has been the shift from traditional laptops to netbooks, and it's hurting their bottom line right at a time when they can least afford that. Apple meanwhile are still reporting strong demand for their laptops compared to the rest of the industry, and as such are feeling the pinch of the downturn less. The profit on Netbooks is so skinny that it only makes sense to sell one if you can do so in large numbers, and Apple have said repeatedly that they're not interested in the volume market, preferring instead to entice as many people as possible towards more profitable models.
Huh? I couldn't be further away from your point. You said:
Apple has never been a real threat to MS. And so long as they refuse to license their OS, they never will be.
I responded by pointing out that Apple tried what you suggested, and instead of boosting them to compete with MS, it nearly killed the company. In what universe is that repeating your point? Not this one!
You need to read up on your history. Apple tried licensing an older version of their OS to clone vendors before. It was a monumental failure and almost killed their hardware business. They won't make that mistake again.
Apple have found a niche for themselves as a combined OS + Hardware vendor where they control the entire environment. They aren't the cheapest, and they will never dominate the industry AND THEY DON'T CARE! For one simple reason: enough people like what they produce to generate a very healthy, very profitable business. That, at the end of the day is all they want and they're succeeding at it. For now anyway.
Microsoft is right to consider Linux as a bigger threat, because Linux hits them right where they're at their least competitive and where there is lots of money to be lost: in the business sector. Linux has grown up over the years to become a real power house on the server and deservedly so. And Linux solutions are just getting better and stronger with every year. It's relentless.
Most serious scripts are (and continue to be) written using/bin/sh. Maybe your definition of serious is something different?
Yeah right. I've worked at a few places where/bin/sh was the strict standard. And guess what, every one of the "serious" scripts I saw were liberally peppered with invocations of sed & awk to get anything "serious" done, because/bin/sh is so devoid of useful builtins. In all cases the use of awk for example was an unholy mess, and anyway, writing scripts like that breaks the golden rule for writing fast scripts: i.e. stick to using buildins as much as possible to keep the number of context switches down to a minimum.
If anyone wants to do "serious" scripting, then they should pick the right tool for the job, and/bin/sh just doesn't cut it.
Itanium does have a place, but it's at the very high end of the server market. As long as these platforms exist, it proabably will as well
Why? If Tukwilla had shipped on time, Itanium might have had a chance to claw back some mind share. But the slippage is going to push it into a similar release window as the Beckton Core i7, 8-core (16 thread) monster. Beckton will be cheaper, faster and share the same QuickPath chip interconnect. What value is there for me or anyone else choosing Itanium over a superior product at a lower price point?
.. a stupid argument. Open Source dictates that anyone who has a desire to do so can roll their own version. Even if developers decided to focus on one distro only, it still doesn't stop other people from cloning it, re-branding and launching their own. Witness Redhat, CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux for example.
Linux guarantees no vendor lockin. And today that applies to where you get your OS from as well as who's hardware you choose to run it on. From a customer point of view that's GREAT, as it fosters more competition and innovation from the providers.
Anyone arguing otherwise just doesn't understand business and market forces.
Most of the news reports are not getting the complete picture. Apple have posted a dedicated battery page that talks about it in more detail. Here's the paragraph that expands on the 1000 charge info:
The lifespan of a battery is measured in recharges. One recharge is a complete charge and discharge of a batteryâ(TM)s energy. A recharge doesnâ(TM)t necessarily occur every time you plug in your notebook; many partial charges can add up to a single full recharge. The typical battery delivers about 200 to 300 recharges before its capacity declines to approximately 80 percent. At that point the battery still works, but its performance is diminished. Thanks to the breakthroughs of advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging, the battery in the 17-inch MacBook Pro can go through up to 1000 recharges before it reaches 80 percent of its original capacity -- more than three times the lifespan of typical notebook batteries
So it's not 1000 recharges and then throw it away!
Personally, between a Linux and an OSX server to admin I just flip a coin if there is no price difference
I'm pretty disappointed with OS X under the hood. Apple don't seem to pay as much attention to it as they do the Aqua front end. How for instance are you supposed to be able to tell when you have an I/O disk bottleneck problem on OSX? Neither iostat or vm_stat report %iowait for the CPU, and the pittance of information you get out of iostat on OSX is a joke.
Linux on the other hand shows a very clear picture of what's going on. If there's a problem then iostat -mx 5 will show high cpu %iowait values, and those disks with high % utilization, queue service times, etc.
The ability to easily and quickly do this kind of trouble shooting is bread and butter for daily admin tasks, and OSX comes up well short. None of the DTrace tools provided help here either.
And don't get me started on the state of the man pages. They aren't accurate or up to date. Where for example is the pstat command? It must be part of the BSD tool set, because it's mentioned in some man pages, but doesn't exist on OSX.
OSX is a great desktop OS and I use it a lot. But I would never choose it over Linux for a server.
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Um, that's not strictly true. The domU Xen Code is already in the mainline kernel, and there's been some recent discussion to include dom0 as well. Based on a recent LWN article ( Xen: finishing the job ) I'd say there's a very good chance that will happen.
I used to work on Tru64 Unix on Alpha, back in the day when it was (arguably) the best platform amongst its peers. Certainly the Alpha chip was. What I learned from that experience is that where business and money is involved, the best technical solutions are not always the winners. That said, the fact that all of KVM is part of the core Linux kernel now means that it will benefit from constant and continuous development and improvement. So I fully anticipate that it will eclipse Xen at some point in the relatively near future, which is why I personally am paying a lot more attention to it than I have in recent years.
Agreed, and as SuSE Novel have thrown their weight behind Xen, that would appear to be the distro of choice for you.
Um, no I'm not missing the point. I know they're not claiming it's going to be supported in RH6, which I understand to mean that it won't be. But it will be supported in RH 5.{7,8,9} or whatever the release is in 5 years time. And 5 years is an age in this business.
I don't think so. Businesses implementing new builds today will be looking for a technology refresh 5 years from now, and by then I fully expect Redhat to have proven tools at their disposal that can import/convert Xen VMs into KVM VMs in the same way that VMware can import Parallels VMs now. There will be a migration path.
What gets me are those that believe in #1 and also think that they can use events in the bible to back-track the creation of the earth to less than 10,000 years: like Texas school board chairman Dr Don McLeroy in the article.
If the bible were without error and free of contradiction, then the genesis story of creation would be true: and thus the earth was created before the stars, as that's the order of events genesis describes.
Given that we know the speed of light and are able to calculate that light from far away cosmic events witnessed today have taken billions of years to get here, how do people like McLeroy explain that one! If that isn't a contradiction, I don't know what is.
Never heard of Oracle Data Guard then?
"lsb_release -a" is a better command, because it works on all major distributions, regardless of the type.
Given that the person from Redhat said that Xen will be supported in RHEL till 2014, and the information you posted says that Xen will be supported for the lifetime of RHEL 5: one can draw the conclusion that the person from Redhat is right because RHEL 5.n will be supported for that long.
KVM is great and all, but I'm sure Redhat don't expect customers to dump Xen until they've had a decent return on their investment. Redhat are not dumb.
I usually use: "/ (root)" to cover those in the know, and those who aren't.
I happen to agree with Ted and yourself from a technical stand point. But where Ted stuffed up is that from ext3 to ext4 he moved the goal posts and didn't communicate effectively to the community what effect this would have. Nor did he explore before hand the consequences of moving said goal posts on software widely in use. He's since done the right thing, which is to give people a choice; and the public fall out from all this has done the communication for him. But he could have saved himself a public ear bashing if he'd gone about this differently. Hopefully he'll remember this next time.
Or Oracle: if you're rolling out a lot of 11g databases or going with a RAC cluster; as Oracle Enterprise Linux = Redhat = CentOS, plus a few extras like OCFS2 packaged with it.
Canonical with Ubuntu Server could yet be a force to be reckoned with as it matures, if the support price is competitive with the other guys. The real trick though is to get Ubuntu Server certified by all the big hardware vendors for use on all their x86(-64) product lines. That's what will open the door to commercial sales and lead to more support contracts.
Whoops, figner trouble ;-) I meant MSTSC.
You've pretty much summed up many of the challenges Linux desktop distributions have to overcome to be in a fit state to pitch for a place on the desktop of most corporations. And while many of the tools to do some of these reside on isolated islands of innovation, there is no unifying management interface. A detailed description of how to do all this would probably be enough material to put in a book.
Here are some little gems you might want to check out:
You'll want to keep an eye on freeIPA. When it hits V2 it'll become very useful to you.
The CODA Filesystem is the only one I know of that provides disconnected operation for mobile computing.
And I'll throw my weight behind Nomachine NX too. Definitely the best MSTCS equivalent in the Linux space.
Nice solution if you want all users of a workstation to be tied to the same environment. But I believe what the Parent wants is a mechanism where by different users can login to any system and their personal environment and "system view" follow them around where ever they go and can be setup and controlled from a central place. i.e. one user might have a "profile" where the Preferences menu isn't visible, their web browser uses proxy a.b.c and they have a number of network shares mounted for them. Where as another user has full access to Preferences, uses proxy d.e.f and has no shares visible. On Windows this seems pretty trivial to set up (I'm not an expert). But on *ix it isn't: at least not without lots of bespoke (probably unsupportable) scripting to glue tools together that could do the same.
Now that looks very interesting. Definitely a project to keep an eye on.
Where are my mod points when I need them.
And you need to keep an eye on where you started arguing from and stop trying to twist other peoples words to get out of a loosing position. No one is disputing Apple is happy in their niche position, and that's not what this argument is about.
You started all this by criticizing Apple for refusing to license their OS and directly tied that to the reason why Apple doesn't threaten MS. This infers YOU believe they should license their OS and by association, that they should actively try and threaten MS.
You are wrong. As I have explained to you: that is not going to happen because it doesn't fit Apple's profitable, niche, business model. You know, the one you agree Apple is happy being in.
Apple has accepted it's position in a niche, and isn't going to get out of it. As such, MS has absolutely nothing to fear from them.
Note though that many other things were killing Apple at the time, and the OS they licensed was terrible. You can't reasonably conclude that they couldn't do better now that they have a decent OS.
You don't get it. Apple's primary goal is to be profitable, very profitable: and they're succeeding very well. They are not chasing after the prize of being the dominant software provider, and aren't going to because YOU want them to. They're the no: 2 desktop OS in the world, and they're happy with that.
Like what?
Again, you show a complete (naive) lack of understanding WRT Apple's business model. If Apple suddenly went from ~3M OS X sales a quarter to ~30M sales a quarter, then they would also have to pull ~30M worth of hardware manufacturing capability out of their ass, and they just don't have that. If they broke their business model and loosed OS X on the work free from hardware encumbrance, then they would loose control of holistic Apple: that very thing that defines the Apple experience. They would be competing on Dell, HP and IBM kit, against the likes of MS Windows and Linux. They could mot compete on price using their own hardware: it would be a financial and marketing disaster.
Personally I put my trust in Apple to know what's best for Apple's business. Not Rix !
My wife and I have just been to see it. Neither of us have read the comic books or knew the characters at all. We both really enjoyed it. Her comments: "Not your typical super-hero film", and neither of us guessed the baddie until he was revealed. Definitely one for the DVD list.
I agreed with everything you said up to this point. The Netbooks are turning out not to be so great for business for those that have them in a portfolio with bigger and more profitable models. One of the reasons some vendors have seen big drops in their laptop sales recently has been the shift from traditional laptops to netbooks, and it's hurting their bottom line right at a time when they can least afford that. Apple meanwhile are still reporting strong demand for their laptops compared to the rest of the industry, and as such are feeling the pinch of the downturn less. The profit on Netbooks is so skinny that it only makes sense to sell one if you can do so in large numbers, and Apple have said repeatedly that they're not interested in the volume market, preferring instead to entice as many people as possible towards more profitable models.
Huh? I couldn't be further away from your point. You said:
I responded by pointing out that Apple tried what you suggested, and instead of boosting them to compete with MS, it nearly killed the company. In what universe is that repeating your point? Not this one!
You need to read up on your history. Apple tried licensing an older version of their OS to clone vendors before. It was a monumental failure and almost killed their hardware business. They won't make that mistake again.
Apple have found a niche for themselves as a combined OS + Hardware vendor where they control the entire environment. They aren't the cheapest, and they will never dominate the industry AND THEY DON'T CARE! For one simple reason: enough people like what they produce to generate a very healthy, very profitable business. That, at the end of the day is all they want and they're succeeding at it. For now anyway.
Microsoft is right to consider Linux as a bigger threat, because Linux hits them right where they're at their least competitive and where there is lots of money to be lost: in the business sector. Linux has grown up over the years to become a real power house on the server and deservedly so. And Linux solutions are just getting better and stronger with every year. It's relentless.
Yeah right. I've worked at a few places where /bin/sh was the strict standard. And guess what, every one of the "serious" scripts I saw were liberally peppered with invocations of sed & awk to get anything "serious" done, because /bin/sh is so devoid of useful builtins. In all cases the use of awk for example was an unholy mess, and anyway, writing scripts like that breaks the golden rule for writing fast scripts: i.e. stick to using buildins as much as possible to keep the number of context switches down to a minimum.
If anyone wants to do "serious" scripting, then they should pick the right tool for the job, and /bin/sh just doesn't cut it.
Why? If Tukwilla had shipped on time, Itanium might have had a chance to claw back some mind share. But the slippage is going to push it into a similar release window as the Beckton Core i7, 8-core (16 thread) monster. Beckton will be cheaper, faster and share the same QuickPath chip interconnect. What value is there for me or anyone else choosing Itanium over a superior product at a lower price point?
Linux guarantees no vendor lockin. And today that applies to where you get your OS from as well as who's hardware you choose to run it on. From a customer point of view that's GREAT, as it fosters more competition and innovation from the providers.
Anyone arguing otherwise just doesn't understand business and market forces.
Most of the news reports are not getting the complete picture. Apple have posted a dedicated battery page that talks about it in more detail. Here's the paragraph that expands on the 1000 charge info:
So it's not 1000 recharges and then throw it away!
I'm pretty disappointed with OS X under the hood. Apple don't seem to pay as much attention to it as they do the Aqua front end. How for instance are you supposed to be able to tell when you have an I/O disk bottleneck problem on OSX? Neither iostat or vm_stat report %iowait for the CPU, and the pittance of information you get out of iostat on OSX is a joke.
Linux on the other hand shows a very clear picture of what's going on. If there's a problem then iostat -mx 5 will show high cpu %iowait values, and those disks with high % utilization, queue service times, etc.
The ability to easily and quickly do this kind of trouble shooting is bread and butter for daily admin tasks, and OSX comes up well short. None of the DTrace tools provided help here either.
And don't get me started on the state of the man pages. They aren't accurate or up to date. Where for example is the pstat command? It must be part of the BSD tool set, because it's mentioned in some man pages, but doesn't exist on OSX.
OSX is a great desktop OS and I use it a lot. But I would never choose it over Linux for a server.