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.'"

US-based startup?

[TheRaven64]

From TFA:

Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource

Looking at the XenSource web site, they have three offices, two in the US and one in the UK. Considering that they are a spin out from Cambridge University (in the UK), developing software originating in Cambridge University, calling them US-based seems highly misleading.

Re:Summary is incomplete

[FictionPimp]

Now if we could only get them to support their novell client on distro's other than suse.

Xen is in (Red Hat's) Fedora Core 6 Test 2

[hey]

announcement [fedoranews.org]
There must have been some issues.

Re:Red Hat's fault

[walt-sjc]

And what if you want to add a package to only one of the VMs?

Then you add a package to that VM. That's what RW snapshots allow you to do. Go read the LVM howto that I referenced above. If you want to delete a package, go ahead and delete a package. It really IS that simple.

Incorrect Oracle stats

[Finite9]

"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"

Well, this is blatantly incorrect. a new instance of Oracle 9ir2 takes up as much memory as you allocate to it. If you choose "percentage of available physical memory" and you have 512MB and set it to 50% then the instance will take roughly 256MB. You can set the SGA manually to whatever you want, but performance wont be that great depending on usage!

My dev. instance on XP Pro is 68Mb and I have several schemas that have datatfiles with 5GB in them - dataset size does not affect instance size, in Oracle at least, but I suppose that the poster may mean something else when referring to 'dataset'. I take it to mean 'the size of the data stored in the datafiles'. I know nothing about MySQL but would find it very strange if memory size was affected by dataset size...how much memory do you need then if the dataset is 1000TB?

Re:Incorrect Oracle stats

[Tim C]

how much memory do you need then if the dataset is 1000TB?

I suspect that the OP is caching at least some of his dataset in RAM. My current project uses Oracle 10g on a 4-way Solaris box with 32GB of RAM; we have that much RAM precisely so we can (attempt to) cache the entire dataset in RAM, thus reducing/eliminating disk I/O.

On the other hand, if you don't care about caching huge amounts of data, you don't really need huge amounts of RAM.

(Disclaimer: Damnit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a DBA!)

Mod Parent UP!

[IMightB]

I agree completey, however, I'd just like to point out that Novell/SusE seems to be focusing more on the Desktop while RedHat is focusing more on the Server side. Personally, I feel that the server side is WAY more important, and gets "Linux" (in general) in the door and in the minds of the IT departments. The Desktop follows after that.