After stating that Xen was not yet enterprise ready, Red Hat today tried to mend the relationship between the two companies. El Reg noted that any reference to “XenSource” had been changed into “Xen” in the article, the name of the open source project at the heart of XenSource’s efforts. Red Hat also issued a statement concerning the issue: “Red Hat is firmly committed to open source virtualization, based on the open source Xen project. Red Hat is investing agressively in the Xen project and in ensuring its readiness for the enterprise.”
We will do anything to keep our customers happy.
Most companies try to keep customers happy unless they have a monopoly on an industry and in that case make just good enough stuff to keep the money flowing. Redhat is just another company employing people. I actually like Redhat since they allow their engineers to spend time working on Fedora which I can download for free. FC6 already comes with Xen and it works okay. Redhat is right though since I have used Xen to run Windows and it was flakey on my system.
Edited 2006-08-01 23:57
El Reg noted that any reference to “XenSource” into “Xen”, the name of the open source project at the heart of XenSource’s efforts.
Am I a moron, or does that make no sense whatsoever?
I suspect might a few words missing that sentence.
I think XenSource is the overall project and the “Xen” project is just a sub project, much like konqueror is a sub-project of KDE. I could be wrong though.
Xen is the name of the virtualisation project and software.
XenSource is a commercial entity that sells software based on Xen (and provides funding for several developers, I believe).
Thanks for clearing that up. I knew they were two different entities, I just didn’t know the extent of their differences.
Like it was translated from another language or something.
I work on Xen as a research / contractor so anything I say might be a bit biased 😉 I’ll try not to be, but feel free to question anything I say!
XenSource is the company that markets Xen and sells (proprietary) solutions for using the open source core more effectively.
Xen is one of the software packages in their portfolio. The wider product that subsumes it is XenEnterprize but I’m not entirely sure what that does (I don’t do much on the commercial side).
Xen’s support for Windows is working, but I’m not surprised if you found it not enterprise ready. The full virtualisation stuff is a really big task and there are seemingly quite a lot of corner cases where the emulation isn’t good enough.
There are also tons of places that will want optimisation in the future, and features need to be added to bring full virt guests up to the level of paravirtualised (for instance by supporting suspend / resume / migrate).
Fortunately this work is progressing, and Intel, AMD, and IBM (amongst others) have been quite generous in code contributions.
Nevertheless the fact is that the full virt engine is much newer than the paravirt stuff and needs to mature quite a bit more before it’ll make everyone happy (IMHO, speaking for myself not the company).
Yes the previous announcement was quite politicaly incorrect, as it could harm Xen (XenSource and all the companies that are trying to push the Xen techno toward their customers).
I better hear that. And it’s not about just keeping their own customers happy.
Edit: Corrected typo
Edited 2006-08-02 01:58