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. While rival Novell this month started shipping the software with version 10 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server environment, Red Hat continues to have a lack of confidence in the virtualisation newcomer.
But we will be shipping with it this year. Interesting. Either RedHat is just saying that because SUSE came out with it first or there is actually development moving that quickly at XenSource (or a combination of the two). I particularly found the line at the end amusing, though: “Sun is writing us a big cheque every quarter. They hate it, but they do it,”
Hmmm….. like reiserfs isn’t ready for primetime. Ok I admit I have never used xen as of yet but this rings true to the general attitude of Red Hat. If they aren’t implementing it then its crap. Business as usual for them. They could be right but its hard to believe them when you know their history.
Red Hat doesn’t say ReiserFS isn’t ready for primetime, they even include it in their products. They do not, however, support it. Regarding Xen, they specifically said that it’s not ready for “banking, telco, or any other enterprise customer.” With that I agree, I would not be betting millions of dollars on Xen yet. And if Red Hat includes something in RHEL, they need to be able to support it for those customers.
Geez! At least get the facts strait (and read the OP) before posting…
Fedora support reiserfs v3 (just add selinux=0 reiserfs to the command line) – as it lacks full selinux support (a -major- part of Fedora/RHEL) and due to the fact that reiserfs v3 support is dwindling (due to v4), RH does not support using it.
If you use reiserfs on you Fedora box and it eats your babies, you’re on your own.
As for Xen – it is -not- ready for mission critical tasks. Period. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it under-going too many changes to be considered rock solid. Once Xen enters mainline kernel tree, things should improve.
On the other hand, you can always slender RH for god know what, ignoring completely the subject at hand.
I’m not sure I blame them on that count.
Virtually every filesystem related problem I’ve experienced in Linux was when running on ReiserFS.
well i expect they mean it’s not ready for enterprise use as in “it has no pretty installer/configuration program for n00bs” like vmware/vpc.
plus to get the most out of it, you do need to use custom kernels on the host and guest.
and you need hardware that is not readily available to run windows using it.
i guess i must agree with redhat, and will be sticking with vmware server now it’s out of beta.
No i think he is refering to true ENTERPRISE usage. you know like 99.999 uptime the phone companies absolutely must maintain.
It is just fine for corporate usage, but that doesnt mean true enterprise yet. few things do fall into that range anyways.
The c’t magazine[1] said in volume 13/06: “Xen is technically superior. (…) But Xen is still more a technology preview than a usable product.” They had a quite detailed article (6 pages) about Xen, VMware, Virtuozzo, FreeBSD Jails and others and reported several problems with XEN, especially when using Vanderpool/Pacifica.
I think that XEN is hyped at the moment: It is very plausible to me that it needs just some more work. At least Fedora Core 6 Test 2 is delayed due to XEN problems. Maybe XEN works good für Linux but not so good for other guest systems (mainly Windows) and Novell either
a) has some really clever software engineers which fixed all the problems for them.
b) decided that XEN has enough functionality and is stable enough to ship it, even if there are some glitches.
c) shipped XEN prematurely and will have to push patches for a long time until Xen is really usable – they had this kind of problem with their packagement management just some weeks ago.
I don’t think Red Hat bashing leads anywhere.
fs
[1] http://www.heise.de/ct/ – c’t is a well known german computer magazin and very open-source friendly in general.
c) shipped XEN prematurely and will have to push patches for a long time until Xen is really usable – they had this kind of problem with their packagement management just some weeks ago.
The difference is that Suse’s package management problems were not a part of a shipped product. The issues were only with a release candidate, which is understandable and perfectly acceptable.
Edited 2006-08-01 16:32
The difference is that Suse’s package management problems were not a part of a shipped product
I guess you dont consider open” suse 10.1 as a release which even according Novell had heavily broken package management. Did you know that Xen in SLES 10 is a disaster? Just check the xen user list.
I guess you dont consider open” suse 10.1 as a release which even according Novell had heavily broken package management. Did you know that Xen in SLES 10 is a disaster? Just check the xen user list.
No I don’t consider Opensuse as a release, at least one of importance. Opensuse is the equivalent of Fedora. It isn’t a supported distribution. It is supposed to be bleeding edge, which brings instability and bugs. As for Xen I didn’t make a comment on it so I’m left wondering why you even brought it up.
Novell, along with most software companies, tend to get things out the door before they are fully ready. However, any IT group or even single sys admin wouldn’t put the first real release version of anything into a critical production system without testing it fully first. Even then they will have support for the product during their testing phase.
Personally though, I’d take the line of XEN not being ready more to heart if it came from someone from the trenches trying to use it rather than some executive who has never used the product. Even if that came from a Red Hat person with some sort of technical abilities.
Novell, along with most software companies, tend to get things out the door before they are fully ready.
Agreed. The xen implementation in SLES 10 only supports virtualized instances of SLES 10, so clearly they’ve only got it working under controlled circumstances. Certainly that would be sufficient for many uses, but I don’t think that’s really meeting it’s full promise, yet it’s pushed as complete. Add it to the list with xgl, zen-management and anything mono, of things that are sort-of-almost-but-not-quite ready for mainstream. I’m not sure if Novell is competing with Red Hat or Fedora.
I’m more than willing to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt on this one.
… Don’t forget that RH is shipping Xen with Fedora since FC4. (Actually, alpha RPMs were released for mid-life FC3).
This is -not- PR speak; If anyone knows how stable Xen is/not, it’s RH/Fedora.
I’m sure Novell has no intention or *ever* supporting anything other than SLES guests on Xen… *maybe* RHEL, but I couldn’t speculate on how open Novell would be to that idea. How are they support me if I decide to run FreeBSD (for example) as a Xen guest? That’s never going to happen, no matter how stable Xen gets.
You know who will support me right now if I wanted to run Xen on RHEL with SLES, RHEL, and FreeBSD guests running concurrently? It’s pretty obvious:
http://www.xensource.com/products/xen_enterprise/
So I’m with Novell on this one. Why not distribute Xen kernels and utilities as optional packages for your enterprise server product when there is incredible demand? You can support your own OS as a guest and use your early adopters as bug testers, just like software vendors have been doing for decades. The banks and telcos are still wondering if the 2.6 kernels are stable enough yet. They wouldn’t touch Xen with a ten-foot pole even if Red Hat sponsored a “Xen is incredibly stable” parade through the streets of New York. Small hosting companies, however, want it now. Just give it to them.
It’s sad to see a news like that.
Redhat has a bigger influence than the average joe could guess. Companies like mine are trying to push forward open source to our customers. We are doing it with success. However, every single meeting we face sceptisism from our customers. Questions like: “Why should we use this techno developed by a guy in a foreign contry we even don’t know? Who else is using it?”. When you can reply: “Redhat/Novell/(Other big player e.g. IBM) is backing it up” then you have a very convincing argument.
Redhat moving away from it position as a leader harm others. A leader would only try to fix the problem until it’s ready to be shipped. But now Redhat seems to care a lot more about it’s commitments to the management.
Red Hat does try and fix it. They’re responding to the fact that everyone and their mother is asking for Xen support and that their major competitor, Novell, is including it. They’re stating their position: today, Xen is not at a point where they can support it for their customers running mission critical apps on RHEL. They also said, however, that they hope that Xen will be ready soon so they can include it in their next release.
Does anyone even bother to spend 1 second thinking before bashing Red Hat anymore? This is about Red Hat’s commitment to their customers, it has nothing to do with “management.”
Does anyone even bother to spend 1 second thinking before bashing Red Hat anymore?
This is OSNews we are talking about here. On any tech related website (Slashdot is the worst), as soon as a company gets big, they can do no right, and alterior motives are applied to every statement coming out of the company’s management, employees and their dogs’ mouths.
What is this? So now, because it is “RedHat” we cannot contest anymore?
According to you if a big company says: “Oh! This techno is not ready for enterprise use!” You just sit and scream at people if they contest the big company opinion! That the kind of attitude you are defending? And my god! You have been moded up for that!
Be glad that when Microsoft said “Linux is not ready for entreprise use”, there was enough wise people to see that this was not the case.
By not ready for production, RedHat means: if you have a set of requirements, like “the National Australia Bank” then Xen is not ready for you. In many other company like mine, Xen is of capital importance for our testing platform (we can simulate our set of production servers on one testing machine). For us, Xen is enterprise-use-ready enough.
So yes, such announcement do harm more than it should, especially when you face your customers. Because they are unable to fix Xen to integrate it in their distribution on time, they claim that Xen in not enterprise use ready. You see my point? Yes this is a sad thing to say.
P.S: You moded me down. This also is unfair. You just disagreed to my opinions, which is not a reason to mod me down.
P.S.2: And just now the new is “RedHat in trying to mend relationship with Xensource”. Even RedHat itself realize it was a sad thing to say.
Edited 2006-08-02 01:53
It’s actually not that unusual. RedHat has positioned themselves as the conservative safe choice for Linux.
RedHat has said that Linux was not ready for the desktop for ages and only recently turned around (about the time OpenOffice 2.0 and GNOME 2.8 came out and DBUS-HAL got integrate properly). It was pretty much the last distro to say that Linux was ready for the desktop, so when RedHat said, Linux was ready, conservative users of Linux trusted RedHat and moved en mass, trusting that RedHat had worked out all the kinks.
Novell seems to be taking the bleeding edge corporate approach, more bleeding edge than even Ubuntu. It won’t influence the conservatives, but it will attract the bleeding edgers that must have corporate backing and don’t mind a few hiccups (e.g. XGL isn’t quite ready for prime time).
In the end, it’s good to have both. It gives corporate customers choice about the level of safety versus bleeding edge they’re comfortable with. That’s one of the advantages of having multiple distros. Companies like Microsoft or Sun can’t attack the market this way without sending mixed messages that confuse its customers.