Xen Not Ready for Prime-time, says Red Hat

daria42 writes "A senior Red Hat executive today maintained the Xen open source virtualisation environment was not yet ready for enterprise use, despite 'unbelievable' customer demand and the fact rival Novell has already started shipping the software."

Re:Xen's Problems

[baadger]

Xen demonstrate Windows running on top of Xen using an Intel processor with VT [com.com]

"Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware" [theregister.co.uk]

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I agree

[IMightB]

wholeheartedly with RedHat on this one. I have rolled out about 12 Xen VM's in our QA dept, and have had lots and lots of very strange little quirks happen, things like SSH/SCP failing with Invalid MAC errors on large file transfers, and a few other things that make it barely usable for what I'm trying to do. I used Virtuozzo at my last job with very large numbers of VM's on a node to 1:1 depending on needs, and it was always rock solid. So I am now playing around with OpenVZ to replace Xen.

The quailfications are clear

[NixLuver]

From TFA:

"We don't feel that XenSource is stable enough to address banking, telco, or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it."

He's talking about environments like the one I work in, where we're expected to deliver a real, honest-to-betsy, 99.999 uptime on our systems. We do sometimes use RHEL in the enterprise for those platforms, but to be fair, it's mostly in RAIC (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers) type applications, or non-call-path systems. Many of our call-path-systems are boxes that can lose a processor without the OS going down - or the application running on it. There are some stand-alone Linux products, and they perform well enough, but I understand his reservations in those arenas. We're not talking about fileservers here, folks. But as we move to a more distributed architecture, where uptime is provided by redundancy rather than the 'robustness' of a single system, something like Xen will become more and more feasible for such applications.

Virtualization != Xen

[ezh]

Xen was a big hype last year, but more virtualization products for Linux come to light, including OpenVZ [openvz.org], others. It is not just about Xen or VMware anymore. In fact, kernel developers work on a common interface for paravirtualization software [lwn.net]. That means users are going to have more choice implementing their kernel containers, whether XenSource stabilizes their product or not.

Re:what is ready?

[shani]

perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT

Except it doesn't support ACPI, which makes it pretty useless for a laptop, which is where I do most of my development. From the XenFaq [xensource.com]:

1.5. Does Xen run on laptops?

Xen will typically run on laptops, but there's currently no support for APM or ACPI, hence you'll experience reduced battery life and no suspend/resume. We hope to add ACPI support in the future, exploiting Linux's existing support.

I'm using the gratis VMWare Server until the day that Xen actually suits my needs.

Re:Xen will be great

[LnxAddct]

Xen support has been in Fedora for a few cores now. They were the first distro with support for Xen. Red Hat has given a lot of help to Xen. So maybe this statement by them should be taken more seriously than most in this thread are. Red Hat has a vested interest in Xen working, and working well.
Regards,
Steve

software virtualization is SO last century!

[Mr. Firewall]

So Xen isn't ready for "prime time" yet. Yawn. So what? It's a software kludge that gives low-end (read: "x86") servers a subset of the partitioning capabilities that IBM's Power processors have had for years.

If you want mission-critical reliability, you should be running hardware that is mission-critical reliable. Hint: that ain't Intel.

Spend a little more, get a p-series server, partition it as many ways as you like (actually, I think you're limited to 32 partitions), and run a different OS on each one, if you like. You can run Linux, you can run AIX, you can run all kinds of stuff. You got your virtualization, you got your management tools, it's proven technology, and it runs in hardware.

Re:what is ready?

[51mon]

i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'

The folks at Novell have more motivation.

They have para-virtualisation of this thing called "Netware" running under SuSE (hmm sure I have a dusty certificate somewhere saying I'm certified on Netware). It lets Netware run on boxes that Netware doesn't have drivers for. It lets customers consolidate servers, upgrade hardware, and keep running their investment in Netware, and I bet Netware is a lot simpler to get running reliably (well as reliably as Netware ever runs, I wonder if SFT works under para-virtualisation) under SuSE, than say a whole enterprise GNU/Linux distro.

Redhat spent "millions" testing Xen ?! Seems a bit much given how much goes into testing some kernel changes.