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.'"

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.

Re:Red Hat's fault

[marcello_dl]

In fact, my leased 2.6.11-xen vserver with debian has performed well since when it was installed, 47 days ago. No X11 stuff on it, of course.

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 [tldp.org] which SPECIFICALLY mentions XEN as an applcaion of RW snapshots.

Re:Red Hat's fault

[_typo]

My computer is running fine networked without inetd/portmap. So are my servers. Inetd is only needed for services that don't do their own daemon and these days that's pretty much none. Portmap is used for RPC so if you're running NFS/NIS you might still need it but it certainly isn't a standard thing either these days. Distros should not enable these by default since they're very much corner cases now.

Seems Odd...

[lefticus]

Seems odd that Novell would "Fire Back." Unix Shell [unixshell.com], 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.

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

Re:Novell more unstable than Xen

[lordeldor]

I don't think Novell needed to have any assistance acquiring SuSE. Novell has for many years thought that linux was the tool with which they could make inroads on the desktop market. Not only that, they had been firmly partnered with SuSE as they were another company that did much of their work in Germany. Not to mention their common goal of linux to the desktop.

Now to be critical of Novell. I have used SuSE both before, and after the Novell buyout. And to be honest I had much more confidence in their earlier systems stabilities. I manage quite a few linux boxen, and most are SuSE. (My boss is a Novell junkie to a fault.) My favorite boxes are inevitably the Debian-stable boxes. Yast is a foul stumbling block if you ask me. And I have had some trouble with features they say are ready for production. If the feature you want relys on a kernel module that is experimental then that feature, and/or your box will only be as stable as that module...No matter how much Novell insists otherwise. I will mention though that I have not found Xen to be an issue. It runs just as well as my patched vanilla kernels on other boxes.

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.

Re:Seems Odd...

[widesan]

Seems odd that Novell would "Fire Back." Unix Shell, where I host my server, has had no end of troubles with Xen.

[...]

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 thought the same thing when I saw the summary. However, unixshell# uses some features of Xen pretty heavily that it seems everybody else barely touches. (see post #8 in this thread [unixshell.com] for details) I believe that there are many people using Xen without problems because they never hit those bugs. That's not an excuse for bugs, they still should be fixed, it's just that unixshell# is finding some obscure ones.

In fairness to unixshell#, they are offering to migrate servers to their sister company, and they seem to be very forthcoming about the status of their servers. It seems that they are experiencing *occasional* lock-ups and reboots. Some people don't care, others do, and have left. They are actually out of space. It seems that they ordered another server, and were told that there no room by the data center. No warning at all. There are some other public incidents involving the data center's service and unixshell# seems to be reconsidering their choice of data centers. They appear, also, to not be worried about expanding until the Xen bugs are fixed. I don't blame them, more buggy servers means more headaches for the admins.

I just wanted to offer a counter opinion, both Xen and unixshell# have operated above my expectations so far. Xen is a relatively new technology, I expect there may be some hiccups here and there. Until now, I have been fairly lucky.

widesan:/$ uptime
  16:52:04 up 89 days, 8:58, 2 users, load average: 0.09, 0.04, 0.01