Novell Defends 'Unstable' Xen Claims 132
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.'"
who cares about red hat? (Score:1)
xen rules, and will only get better with time. it's like 'mainframes for the masses'.
glad to see some corporation backing it up.
Re:who cares about red hat? (Score:2)
Re:who cares about red hat? (Score:1, Insightful)
anyway, xen is an amazing tool to build a poor man's mainframe if you will use the OSes that have been hacked to run on it (linux, bsd, plan9...). With this new 'vt' technologies being put out by intel and amd, it will even be able to run windows (and anything that runs on a x86) without hacks.
altough it is hardly 'innovation' (ibm has done this stuff like, forever), mad pr0pz to the xen guys for bringing this to the mundane x86 world.
Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
There is more to it than just that. Afterall you still have a cpu to work with afterall...
Tom
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
My workstation is made up of a pair of 940-pin 285s so I won't be switching them out for anything else any time soon.
Tom
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
Wouldn't virtualization depend on the CPU core, not the socket? Or do all AM2 CPUs use a newer core that supports it?
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:1)
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:1)
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:2)
Are Conroe and Merom the only currently-available chips that are VT-capable?
Re:Defining my next purchases (Score:1)
Hardware availability of VT and AMD virtualization
Intel VT was officially launched at the Intel Developer Forum Spring 2005. It is available on all Pentium 4 6x2, Pentium D 9xx, Xeon 7xxx and Core Duo processors, though in the latter case it is sometimes disabled in the BIOS/EFI.
AMD processors using Socket AM2, Socket S1, and Socket F include AMD Virtualization support. In May 2006, AMD introduced such versions of the Athlon 64 and Turion 6
US-based startup? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:US-based startup? (Score:2)
Re:US-based startup? (Score:1)
Regards,
Steve
Re:US-based startup? (Score:2)
It gets better.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It gets better.... (Score:1)
Re:It gets better.... (Score:1)
Re:US-based startup? (Score:2)
Of course its unstable (Score:5, Funny)
Dr. Isaac Kleiner has been warning us about this for years.
Re:Of course its unstable (Score:1)
It's all floaty 'n' stuff!
Re:Of course its unstable (Score:2)
Re:Of course its unstable (Score:1)
Re:Of course its unstable (Score:2)
I thought of Half-Life the moment I saw the title
Summary is incomplete (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Summary is incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Summary is incomplete (Score:2)
Re:Summary is incomplete (Score:1)
Last time I spoke with our Novell tech, he said the only people still running windows are the people who are supporting Novell's windows products (Groupwise client, Zenworks Desktop management, etc.)
Senior VPs should not be allowed off their leashes (Score:5, Insightful)
See what happens when you have VPs snooping around the engineering cubes and trying to redeliver what they thought they heard.
Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely works. (Score:4, Informative)
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:Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely wor (Score:4, Informative)
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:Xen rocks? I don't think so. It just barely wor (Score:2)
That's more important. If I had an Athlon-64 with 12 GiB of RAM, I'd much rather use 64-bit addressing to cleanly use the whole thing rather than segmentation games with chunks of 2, 3, or 4 GiB. (32-bit = 4 GiB; Linux uses...I think the top GiB for the kernel.)
Re:Senior VPs should not be allowed off their leas (Score:1)
Re:Moderators on drugs? (Score:2)
Editing the headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Muttering comment to self: why does English usage keep rotting out to the point where any short concise statement is often made 100% contrary to its intended meaning? If we have to decide everything by context and intuition, why not just have everybody say, "statistically appropriate speach act" as a placeholder? (Or "statistically inappropriate speach act" if we want to go with a nudge and a wink.)
stable unless proven otherwise? (Score:2)
The key problem with Xen at this moment is that it's not in the mainline kernel and it's a nontrivial patch. Because of this, it's possible for Xen to break between kernel upgrades unless you put a lot of your own resources into QAing it and undoing any changes in the mainline kernel that damage Xen.
If you've been following the Ubuntu Edgy release, you'd
Re:Editing the headline (Score:1)
Re:Editing the headline (Score:2)
Re:Editing the headline (Score:2)
Muttering comment to self: why does English usage keep rotting out to the point where any short concise statement is often made 100% contrary to its intended meaning? If we have to decide everything by context and intuition, why not just have everybody say, "statistically appropriate speach act" as a placeholder? (Or "statistically inappropriate speach act" if we want to go with a nudge and a wink.)
Yeah! I agree with this wholeheartedly!
One question, though: What's "speach"? Prefix-pluralization of a fru
Re:Editing the headline (Score:2)
Indeed.
I didn't need the sarcasm tag, did I?
Re:Editing the headline (Score:1)
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Red Hat's claims were slightly too far (Score:2)
I would not consider using it for telecom switches or the like.
Re:Sure bub. (Score:1)
Don't be an idiot. Linux has been used in telco, banking, wall street, appliances and even spacecraft for years without a problem. I have to agree with RedHat on this one. I have used Novell's Xen and I have had a lot of problems. It works a lot better under Fedora Core 5, however I wouldn't use it for real yet. Stick it back in, it isn't done yet.
Red Hat's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
But, no one said it's Xen's fault. It's just the fact that cramming ten virtual machines into a single system is not a good idea when the minimal install is 1.2GB like with Red Hat's latest offerings, crawling with memory-hungry daemons. I keep whining on Debian's mailing lists about unneeded cruft like inetd or portmap in the default system, as IMHO 100MB is way too bloated. And 100MB, is, well, a bit less than 1.2GB.
(Disclaimer: the figure of 1.2GB is something I vaguely remember reading about on
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. For 34 databases on my old non-partitioned server there is only one over 100MB and three over 10MB -- I guess this is the typical distribution.
Neither Red Hat nor Oracle are capable of scaling down; Xen is worthless if you can't trim down your virtual machines.
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Granted, I think you should have the ability to disable them if you want, but as a distro you have to target an audience who like it or not, like the whole "networking" fad.
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
To be honest though, I haven't touched Debian in a few years... Once you go Gentoo, you never go
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
At home, Debian has been relegated to the firewall, which has no hard disk and runs from a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. The small size of the minimum install comes very useful there.
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Gentoo is not a DLS style distro though. So comparing it to one is a bit misleading.
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
A lot of people own more than one computer nowadays [heck I have 5 in my office] so networking means more than just "get on them internets".
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
And actually, the brunt of file copying I did recently was over subversion
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Your post makes me want to hurt you. Badly.
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
It's not purely about speed, though. I do scp even among Xen domains inside the same physical machine. It's more about security separation.
If I pwn one of your boxes and want to hurt you, I'll be able to delete all your files in one go. To hurt me, you would have to pwn every machine on its own. There's no NIS, too, so to get the credentials yo
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
And if you're that paranoid about security what are you doing with users in your network you don't trust?
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
It looks like you think "network" is a synonym for "share files between." I don't know how to break this to you, but people do a lot more things on networks than just share files. In fact, some people don't share files at all.
I can understand where you're coming from, if you envision a bunch of Unix machines where you can log into any of them and your home directory is mounted and you're ready to run all your typical apps. But many networks are set up with m
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Tom
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:1)
But if you want to you can install Xorg/X11 and access it remotely via VNC.
Here is one guide on how to do that [debian-adm...ration.org]. (Adding an SSH tunnel would make a lot of sense for remote connections, but should be simple.)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
And even if you insist, X was _designed_ to be accessed remotely. No need to use VNC -- it would just destroy window integration.
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:3, Funny)
You obviously don't work for Oracle.
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:1)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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:Red Hat's fault (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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 256
Re:Incorrect Oracle stats (Score:3, Interesting)
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!)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:1)
Re:Red Hat's fault (Score:2)
Your's fault (Score:1)
news for you: Oracle don't ship RPMs (and all they customers (HAVE to) let)!
Press conference at the schoolyard (Score:5, Funny)
Novell: "Is too!"
Red Hat: "Is not, not, double not!"
Novell: "Is too, no backsies!"
More on this story as it develops.
Seems Odd... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Seems Odd... (Score:2, Informative)
[...]
I thought the same thing when I saw the summary. However, unixshell# uses some features of Xen pretty heavily that it seems eve
Re:Seems Odd... (Score:2)
I agree with them (Score:4, Informative)
even running it on a redhat platform....the guests are all ubuntu not sure about redhat
stability while running as a guest.
Xen is in (Red Hat's) Fedora Core 6 Test 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
There must have been some issues.
This is all no big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
This whole thing is all blown out of proportion, and is really no big deal at all. You have to keep in mind who Novell and Red Hat's customers are: companies that want vendor support. For whatever reason, one vendor has decided that it's profitable for them to support Xen, and one has decided that it's not.
That's all this is about. Maybe a tiny piece of the issue has to do with the maturity of Xen, but it just as easily could have to do with how much staff each company has on hand, what areas their support staff has expertise in, whether or not some internal leader/guru has had the time to get around to even looking at Xen much less evaluating it, etc. Red Hat saying Xen isn't ready (i.e. "we can't or don't want to support Xen") isn't any different than me saying MacOS isn't ready (i.e. "I can't or don't want to support MacOS, probably because I don't happen to have a Mac conveniently sitting around right now.").
Predictable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Predictable (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what leads you to believe this. Novell's aim is to make as many people as possible run Novell's OS. Red Hat's aim is to make as many people as possible run Red Hat's OS. The fact that these have some common components is irrelevant. OS X uses bash, gcc and Apache; does this mean that Apple also has a partially shared goal with Red Hat and Novell? Microsoft Windows includes some 4.4BSD code, and s
headline (Score:2)
My memory must be going: I thought it was RH that was claiming that Xen was unstable and that Novell thought the opposite. So I start to read the summary... and after about ten seconds it dawns on me... the headline says exactly the opposite of the summary.
Novell cannot defend ZEN instability (Score:1)
Re:Novell cannot defend ZEN instability (Score:2)
If you haven't you may want to update (assuming your system is functioning with updates enough to do so).
Well if Freeman hadn't killed the Nihilanth... (Score:2)
Stable enough for me (Score:2)
Stable enough for who? (Score:2)
That isn't a shot a Novell, the two companies just have customers that expect a different balance with regards to price, support, and stability, if you look at the market Red Hat is really trying to position itself as having stability and support on par with traditional Unix vendors (such as Sun) while Novell is looking to a lot of the businesses who would find Red Hat's offering too pricey. A xen install that is s
Resonance Cascade Failure (Score:1)
Re:Novell more unstable than Xen (Score:1)
Re:Novell more unstable than Xen (Score:2, Informative)
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 earli
Re:Novell more unstable than Xen (Score:1, Offtopic)
Lots of people refer to "Linux the operating system" (as opposed to "Linux the kernel") as GNU/Linux, as the GNU toolchain is such a hugely important part of the system that they feel that it deserves recognition. It has nothing to do with trying to distance themselves from "Linux the kernel".
Mod Parent UP! (Score:2, Interesting)