Submitted by Lots of news on Xen. Firstly, “This is a document about how to set up XEN and iSCSI on 3 Debian Stable machines so that you can have a virtual host that can be migrated live between 2 of the machines. The third machine will be the common disk for the virtual machine that is seen via the 2 machines running XEN.” Secondly, “IBM and Novell are throwing their considerable weight behind Xen, but some experts are suggesting that these companies may be pushing this nascent technology too far too fast.” Lastly, “You can now run OpenSolaris domains under Xen as dom0 with OpenSolaris domUs too.”
Not necessarily a bad thing.
Unless they intend to ship it as it is, and not let their development teams contribute to feature/stability?
IBM et al are not that stupid I guess…
Unless they intend to ship it as it is, and not let their development teams contribute to feature/stability?
IBM et al are not that stupid I guess…
IBM as with most large organisations is made up of many different parts, and not all parts agree, and they all have there own agenda. While all the techs and programmers relize that that Xen is not ready for the enterprise and production machines yet. Marketing will see Xen and extract any tid bit or shread of positive and hype and advertise it as the greatest thing since slice bread. Hopefully the more technical minds will prevail.
A great example of this type of thing happening is with Systemtap, marketing folks grabbed hold of the project and hyped it, and there was all this talk of it being ready for use in a matter of weeks, nearly a year later Systemtap is no where ready to ship, the mailing list is still sees at least 3-5 bug reports, with the system crashing as a result, for simple things.
not too far, too fast….unless you’re a loyal MS customer, then open source might be moving too far too fast w/o delays.
Since when was progress a bad thing? I would much rather have a constant stream of releases, even if they are mostly “unstable” releases. If this never happens then many projects just stop and what has been developed/discovered is never released to anyone.
Of course, there is always necessary time when things need to be developed without the intervention of others. This was the case with Novell and XGL.
Is it just me or does the “Too far, too fast” article seem to be an advertisement for vmware?
Edited 2006-07-17 21:50
The whole point of the article was that pushing Xen as a corporate product may be premature. It is not attacking OSS, disregarding continued development, or release methodology.
Corporate deployment is a fickle thing. For myself, how many products did I try early on, have a bad experience, and never try again? (even though I accept that they have most assuredly improved in the past few years)
Cinelerra, xine, QT, etc. (Just examples of software that I personally had an issue with a long time ago and never tried again, I have no experience as to their present quality.)
You can’t just say: “I’m an analyst, not a system administator, but nevertheless, my personal experience shows that Xen is not ready for production use.” The more accurate statement would instead focus on the fact that all IT infrastructure decisions must be carefully evaluated and tested before deployed in a production setting, and that including Xen as a first-class citizen in enterprise *nix operating systems is necessary to let customers begin to do just that. Including Xen-patched kernels and Xen userspace utilities on the CDs and in the repositories does not compromise the stability of the system for those who choose not to install Xen.
If these analysts think that Xen is so not ready that it wouldn’t even be worth the time for Novell/IBM/Sun customers to evaluate it, then I’d like to hear their argument. Otherwise, there’s no reason to fault these vendors for making innovative technology available as an option for their systems.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060718/sftu060.html?.v=63 yet
from which, I quote:
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT – News) and XenSource Inc. today announced they will cooperate on the development of technology to provide interoperability between Xen(TM)-enabled Linux and the new Microsoft® Windows® hypervisor technology-based Windows Server® virtualization. With the resulting technology, the next version of Windows Server, code-named “Longhorn,” will provide customers with a flexible and powerful virtualization solution across their hardware infrastructure and operating system environments for cost-saving consolidation of Windows, Linux and Xen-enabled Linux distributions.
“the lamb shall lie down with the lion, but the lamb will be very nervous” — Woody Allen