Xen Not Ready for Prime-time, says Red Hat 60
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."
In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news, a senior Xen spokesman said Red Hat was not yet ready for enterprise use.
Why are the pronouncements of executives considered newsworthy?
Re:In other news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: In other news (Score:2)
DEC started sliding down the tubes when they started replacing their field engineer
Re:In other news (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? You may not, but I find this very interesting. It says something about the adoption of Xen. You'd rather have an article on some technical Xen stuff, fine, but there's an outside world as well.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
what is ready? (Score:5, Interesting)
i run about 40-50 xen clients on a handful of moderate server hosts.
perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT
quickly reproducible, adjustable resourcing, and lets me give devs root acces on their own clients.
i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'
----
what, read the article? pfft.
Re:what is ready? (Score:5, Informative)
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]:
I'm using the gratis VMWare Server until the day that Xen actually suits my needs.
Re:what is ready? (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck right now if you want a good Xen workstation you better forget about AMD.
Intel does have the VT extensions out and they have an okay 3d video chip set that has full FOSS support.
I have been an AMD fan since the K6-2. Right now for Xen Intel seems to be the way to go.
Drat.
Re:what is ready? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:what is ready? (Score:2)
Now for a workstation what card do I use? Not Nividia since that doesn't work with XEN.
As I said, "Right now Intel has an advantage if you want to use XEN.".
I have an Athlon 64 at home and my wife just bought a notebook that uses an AMD X2. I am not a fan boy so guess what. If you want a workstation today that will run X
Re:what is ready? (Score:3, Informative)
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 relia
Re:what is ready? (Score:2)
Re:what is ready? (Score:2)
I assume the motivation is client driven. They may have ported a lot of their own code to GNU/Linux, but I expect there is a client base of installed Netware, with third party software etc. That said I haven't seen Netware running anywhere for years, but then I'm no longer consulting in a different place every week.
Re:what is ready? (Score:2)
perfect for dev work. i mean PERFECT
quickly reproducible, adjustable resourcing, and lets me give devs root acces on their own clients.
i presume the redhat dude meant was 'redhat isnt ready to commercially support xen'
That it worked in your configuration doesn't means it lacks serious issues. Xen is still a relatively immature product in the virtualization market and probably has a was to go before it's bulletproof enought to compete with V
Re:Xen's Problems (Score:5, Informative)
"Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware" [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Xen's Problems (Score:1, Flamebait)
Hahahahaaha! Retard - most people want to run windows desktops.
Cluestick for you - linux is killing windows in the server space.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Understanable given the risks (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering this technology will make a debut in it's next gen release, it's not really all that much time to wait.
It's plainly obvious what they are doing... prepare themselves in it's near entirety for the mass of users with xen related issues. This will show how professional they really are, and not just willing to jump on the bandwagon.
New tech == new problems
Nothing to see here, move along.
Re:Xen will be great (Score:2)
Re:Xen will be great (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Was I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Was I the only one... (Score:2)
Probably, considering RedHat is the source.
Re:Was I the only one... (Score:1)
Pot. Kettle. Black. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Pot. Kettle. Black. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then:
* Let's ship this (gcc-2.96)!
Now:
* Let's not ship this (Xen).
Maybe they have simply become wiser with the years?
I agree. (Score:2)
Oh, wait...
Keep one thing in mind (Score:4, Interesting)
RedHat just doesn't yet feel that the time is right, but unlike other companies who like to FUD their competitors, RedHat wants the time to eventually become right so that they can comfortably include Xen into their products.
Re:Keep one thing in mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Keep one thing in mind (Score:2)
But not as much interest as they have in RedHat succeeding. Basically, they don't have management GUIs or an internal training process in place for Xen yet, so they're claiming that Xen isn't yet ready in an effort to stop people from abandoning redhat for SuSe because they want Xen and they want it now.
I agree (Score:3, Informative)
RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, I agree with them on Xen even though I hate RedHat. Xen is a great performer and a very capable platform, but management is difficult and it is still lacking a lot of important features that VMware implements. This is part of the reason for the performance hit of VMware ESX vs Xen. When Xen gets up to a very equivalent feature level I think that you'd see the performance gap is going to be a lot smaller. In a hosting application or something when your company can afford the overhead of maintaining Xen -- go for it. If you are actually worried about maintaing the VM's and can't take the extra headache of being a Xen admin as well, go for ESX.
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:4, Insightful)
VMware datacenter product only supports the enterprise Suse & Redhat products (none of the non-enterprise products), while VMware workstation products support: Mandriva, Mandrake, Redhat, Suse, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, etc. VMware has two different products lines, and look there's Suse and Redhat with two different product lines too, the reason that VMware support those two surely can't be that Suse & Redhat product lines match with VMware product lines, and in can't be that VMware chose RHEL as it's console OS for ESX was because of Redhat's commitment to long lifespan, stability or that there are lots more 3rd party enterprise tools that are certified with it than any other distribution it has to be colusion between the two while they rub their hands together nefariously, that is the only reasonable explanation.
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:2)
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:2)
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:2)
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:2)
Re:RedHat's Ties to VMware (Score:1)
The quailfications are clear (Score:5, Informative)
"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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Virtualization != Xen (Score:1)
You are right. There are other solutions available, and there will be more to come.
By the way, paravirtualization is quite different from OS-level virtualization [wikipedia.org] (which OpenVZ [wikipedia.org] and others do). For now, Xen is the only open source solution in the paravirt. area (other is VMware, there is also a patch from Rusty Russel to add an interface for hypervisors), while in OS-level virt. we have as many as four players, and at least two open source solutions. Who are those players and solutions? See below (taken fro
Marketting... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they're trying to pour some "FUD" over current Xen distributions like, particularly, Novell's in order to make people wait for RH's version which will be "ready"
despite Novell (Score:2)
software virtualization is SO last century! (Score:3, Informative)
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:software virtualization is SO last century! (Score:2)
This is 100% backwards. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers is the new model - design for failure with many cheap redundant servers. There are very few applications remaining where this is not a more cost effective (or just plain effective) approach than expensive "mission-critical" hardware.
-Isaac
Re:software virtualization is SO last century! (Score:3, Interesting)
They simply said they felt that it is not ready now and not that it wouldn't be ready. If you had read the article further, it would have noted Red Hat has been working with the software and wants to implement it in their next release. Red Hat tends for more stability over functionality. Novell is