"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:2009-06-30
Certainly the fact that Mono is sponsored and controlled by their competitor doesn't help, neither does the unclear legal status.
But all the politics aside, I fail to see how using Mono instead of Java would help them porting the whole thing faster. In either case they have to rewrite it from scratch, perhaps tweaking parts of the design along the way. And with all the Java know-how RedHat has, and maturity of Java itself, I'm not surprised seeing they chose it instead of Mono.
Member since:2006-05-09
I think depending on an open source platform sponsored by a competitor like Novell is better than using a closed platform sponsor like MS.
Anyway, Mono has a very legal status; Microsoft published a "Community promise" (http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx) when they say you are sure developing any implementation of several technologies, including C# and their base libraries; in other hand, Mono has developed a nice ecosystem with their own classes useful to develop new things from that with no danger of being sued.
Member since:2006-11-19
My impression was a significant portion of the code was already written in C#, making porting almost trivial (Novell provides tools to automate Windows -> Linux .Net migration).
There might also be C# -> Java source code converters, too. But I don't think it will be as efficient as using the same language / libraries across platforms.
Member since:
2006-11-19
So they bought a enterprise virtualization system, which has Windows 2003 based servers and WPF (.Net) based user interface. It currently requires both the server and management console to be run on Windows machines.
And instead of benefiting from existing mono infrastructure, they'll rewrite the whole system in another language (probably Java).
The only conclusion I can come up with is that RedHat really despises mono.