"As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat's new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers. You'd be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft's Windows Server. That's no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system. According to Red Hat, the plan is to have a Linux version ready by some point in 2010. But in the meantime, Red Hat customers who want to run the virtualization manager must purchase or already own a Windows server."
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Member since:2009-11-07
I think that a large portion of the customers who want this kind of product would already have Windows systems in their environment. Especially if they're already using an alternative like VMWare vSphere, which another post noted requires Windows too.
> They've had a pretty reasonable amount of time to come up with something that runs on their own systems.
They bought Qumranet 14 months before the GA release of the product. In that time they'd need to fix bugs and polish it to the point that's it suitable for release - I'd expect a better first release from someone like Red Hat than a small startup. They'd presumably need to train support people and a whole bunch of other things too.
Not requiring Windows would either have meant rewriting the whole GUI bit (requiring a *lot* more development and QA), or suddenly supporting Mono and probably rewriting large chunks which use things Mono doesn't implement.
Member since:2005-07-06
Not being able to run the management tools on your own product is unforgiveable, and Microsoft must be pleased. To not even have come up with a preview is unbelievable. It really should have been a release blocker.
They've done a ton of work on KVM during that time but simply haven't paid attention to the management tools in any way at all.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Supposedly this was done because of time-to-market issues and they were going to think of a Java web based version and some Linux GUI tools later. Yes, the management layer was written for Windows, .Net, SQL Server and Windows Presentation Foundation. You didn't read the requirements wrong. They've had a pretty reasonable amount of time to come up with something that runs on their own systems.
It really speaks volumes as to the state of producing any kind of user-facing GUI system on your average Linux system today and it was a very poor advert for Red Hat and Linux to people already using Xen or VMware.