VoIP handsets. it sounds like this is attempting to be an extension/ technological upgrade of that corporate communications device market.

I mean, if you even /consider/ cisco gear, that usually means you have lots of other people's money and want a solution that 'just works' - Cisco does not compete on price.

Further, unless you are targeting /very small/ companies where the guy making the decision is the owner, and thus is spending his own money, competing on price is rarely a winning strategy. Corporate decision makers make decisions based on "what is least likely to get me fired if things go south" - joe middle manager is unlikely to get a bonus if he saves a couple million going with a cheaper router that works out well, but he will get fired if he buys the cheap router and it goes poorly. The value proposition of cisco is that if you buy cisco kit and it ends up not working? you are less likely to be blamed. I mean, it's cisco. It's usually pretty good shit, even if it is rather overpriced. Also, that's what everyone else is using, 'best practices' right? if the middle manager follows 'best practices' then he's doing his job, right?

now, the thing about competing on price is that in areas where there is quick innovation, you don't see a lot of companies competing on price, so often you can get pretty good margin while still flying under your competition. this is my niche right now; Sure, no large corp would look at me twice, but small companies do, and price-wise, none of my competitors even want to be thought of as my competitors, which is good for me. There is money to be made competing on price in markets that change quickly; it's just your customers, in that case, are not large corporations that spend other people's money.

but my point is that this is not cisco's niche. Cisco, in fact, probably wants to price it's product higher than the 'consumer grade' ipad. the cisco is 'enterprise grade' and we all know that 'enterprise' is code for 'expensive.'

I think that they get a worse rap than they deserve in the open source world. BTRFS anyone? it's not like they don't contribute at all.

I think the problem is twofold: first, they focus on marketing to the PHB- This is likely to get you a bad reputation amongst the techies, unless you are really careful about it. (hell, look at redhat; they deserve an awesome reputation amongst techies, considering the number of linux people they employ and how much they contribute. they have a mediocre reputation.) Second, Oracle seems to have a bad reputation amongst their Engineering staff, and guess what? we talk.

But overall, Oracle is very helpful towards linux; according to the linux foundation, they are in the top 10 companies contributing towards linux[1] (as measured by the number of changes submitted)

So yeah; I mean, I'm not switching to unbreakable linux any time soon, and they certainly aren't red hat, I do think Oracle's reputation should not be as bad as it is.

[1]http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf

is that it's too full of exploitable security holes. I don't run flash (or accoread) on security sensitive computers myself.

seems like paypal would be better off saying so up front; My first reaction was that it was likely more of paypals seemingly racist 'fraud prevention'

yeah, they went over the 'citrix xen' chapter.

But what I was trying to say is that networking under xen is pretty easy for me, as it's just Linux stuff. The times I've had to deal with vmware for clients, I've been frustrated trying to do what I wanted to do with their interface, something obviously designed for windows users. I'm not saying the vmware interface is bad; just that it was designed for a windows user.

'desktop virtualization' which is another animal entirely. (personally, I think desktop virtualization will suffer the same fate of other recent 'thin client' schemes, but really, it's not my area, so that's just wild speculation.)

Provisioning and mass deployments is something I go into a little bit... but certainly isn't the focus of the book. I firmly believe that it is madness to treat physical and virtual servers differently; you want to use one tool for both. And right now, the best one tool is cobbler/koan.

haha. Linode is one of the better providers. they are cheaper than slicehost, but more expensive than I am. According to the latest benchmarks I've seen, though, they beat us all (slicehost, ec2 'small', prgmr.com) in terms of CPU power. (though I'm pretty up front about the fact that I optimize for cheap ram over all else, so the results are unsurprising)

Personally, after the age of 25 or so, I started to agree more and more with Paul Graham on the subject

DomU works, and should continue to work for the foreseeable future; DomU paravirt ops is upstream, so unless debian goes through extra effort to break xen DomU support, it should Just Work.

of the xen stuff- I've had nothing but trouble with it in testing, and looking, it seems that the debian people aren't particularly interested in helping if you have problems, and if you ask the xen mailing lists, they tell you to ask the debian people. If you want stability, you have to deal with the 2.6.18.8-xen kernel distributed by xen.org, or the 2.6.18-patchedtohellandback kernel distributed by RedHat. (the Suse kernel might be stable, I haven't tried it, but the debian port of the suse kernel that is 2.6.27, man, that sucks. Some people say this is because they took the initial patch and have not been good about importing fixes that suse did.)

I've used both those Linux kernels (the xen.org kernel and the RHEL 5 kernel) quite a lot; my experience has been that the RHEL kernel is slightly less stable, while the xen.org kernel has serious driver deficiencies.

For my current production boxes, I'm using the xen.org 2.6.18 system, and I just buy the exact same hardware every time. (Yay for cheap sata_sil cards!)

Another option, of course, is NetBSD5. After starting on NetBSD 3, and switching to linux for pae and x86_64 support, I'm seriously considering switching back, now that NetBSD5 is starting to look good.

Was recommended to me by someone I respect quite a lot, someone who isn't known for being 'fuzzy headed'

But yeah, I read the book and I didn't get it, either.

books can't really compete as references anymore, I don't think. The advantage of a book is that it's easier to sit down and read a book cover to cover than to figure out what you need to look up in order to get an overview of a technology.

hah. being familiar with linux, and not so familiar with Windows, I had the opposite problem. Xen networking is... Linux networking. (the big problem is that the Dom0 kernel is crusty and ancient; something that should be remedied with Xen 4, which should be out Real Soon Now.)