Novell chief technology officer Markus Rex has hit back at criticism the company included an ‘unstable’ Xen virtualisation environment in its new Linux server, pointing to support from hardware partners. “We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”
The Xen that’s shipped with Fedora Core 6 Test 2 isn’t stable for me, that’s for sure. I selected the package during installation and it booted into a Xen-enabled kernel, ran xend and then promptly hung trying to run “firstboot”. Re-installing FC6T2 without Xen selected ran firstboot quite happily. Now it could quite easily be FC6T2’s fault here of course, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence in Xen for me at least…
So because an alpha (or is it beta? I can’t keep track) version of Fedora (which is supposed to be a software testbed anyway with bleeding edge software etc etc) doesn’t work well with xen, your confidence in Xen is shaken?
I haven’t tried it, so I’m not trying to attack you – your post just doesn’t make much sense to me at all. If anything, I’d try using it with SLED since Novell says it’s supported and works well – maybe I’ll try an install this afternoon.
They can’t really say anything else when they ship it with there products. The same thing with RedHat. What else can they say when they don’t. The only way to know is to try for your self I guess.
Edited 2006-08-11 10:44
Some “testing” wouldn’t have gone amiss. We really don’t need another company indulging in Microsoft-quality software.
> We really don’t need another company
> indulging in Microsoft-quality software.
Looks like Red Hat’s FUD was successful.
Novell made the better Xen packages for SLES 10 and Red Hat doesn’t like that. It’s really as simple as that.
What people don’t seem to get is that Red Hat’s criticism refers to Red Hat’s own packages – they are indeed unstable and not enterprise ready.
And now they try to keep people away from products with better Xen implementations. But it won’t work that way, it’s too transparent.
so far the tests show that XEN is useable; the demonstrations NOVELL made also were awesome.
There were some rough edged but it’s seriously useable with NOVELL’s stuff.
I cannot comment on RH’s trials.
Looks like Red Hat’s FUD was successful.
It isn’t “FUD.” Commentary by people other than RedHat has also indicated the immaturity of Xen technology. Xen is especially limited in focus at the moment since the way it works internally seems to favour Linux more than anything else. Not only that, there are several rough spots within Xen internally. To the credit of the Xen development team though, they are working to address these issues. However, I think Novell is insane to try to claim Xen is a stable, reliable, production-ready technology. It hasn’t had nearly enough production or enterprise level deployment yet to claim that.
Everyone I know of that has experimented with Xen has been doing just that, experimenting. No one seems ready to really commit themselves to it, just yet.
Well, you know what they say, opinions are like a certain part of the anatomy. Everyone has one.
Regardless, my original point was this: You would have expected Novell to check Xen and see whether it was suitable, and therefore have something more substantial and professional to say to defend itself with than “oh but so-and-so said such-and-such”.
You would have expected Novell to check Xen and see whether it was suitable, and therefore have something more substantial and professional to say to defend itself with than “oh but so-and-so said such-and-such”.
No, it doesn’t inspire confidence at all. If they’d told us that their Xen was running different flavours of Linux, Netware and Solaris reliably and they were working on management tools then you would have got the impression that they were really confident about it.
As it is, what Markus Rex has said just makes it sound as if Xen really isn’t ready:
“We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”
“So I guess the other vendors would not do that if it weren’t ready.”
I mean, if these people had come out and said it’s OK then it must be. Right? Notice he said ‘in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’ as well, which basically means don’t try running anything else as a guest.
For the first part of that, I agree that Mr. Rex could have made a stronger case, but sometimes releasing information relating to internal test procedures or customer deployments is tricky business.
As for the second point, I don’t think that Novell, Red Hat, Microsoft, or any other distributor of a Xen dom0 will ever support running third-party domUs of their system. How can Novell support someone else’s whole operating system? There is currently one company that will support multi-party Xen configurations: XenSource.
This is the fallacy of mixed-OS virtualization. Your support options are limited, and you have different sets of admins with different skills managing the same machine. Enterprise IT is better off buying two massive servers for each platform they require, each running OS-level virtualization around individual services, with two-node high-availability clustering to vastly decrease planned and unplanned downtime.
Xen should focus on desktop virtualization for all of the consumers that want Windows and Linux at the same time and don’t care about support.
Looks like Red Hat’s FUD was successful.
Novell made the better Xen packages for SLES 10 and Red Hat doesn’t like that. It’s really as simple as that.
What people don’t seem to get is that Red Hat’s criticism refers to Red Hat’s own packages – they are indeed unstable and not enterprise ready.
And now they try to keep people away from products with better Xen implementations. But it won’t work that way, it’s too transparent.
People overlook the fact that Novell’s implementation of Xen will only work with virtualized versions of SLES. So you can run a virutalized version of your Novell OS under your Novell OS. That being the case, clearly they had to do some hacking and workarounds to get it working under controlled circumstances, so I wouldn’t dismiss what Red Hat said as FUD.
They’ve “pledged” expanded support for other versions of Suse Linux and Windows in a future service pack, no word on a date.
If Novell’s limited Xen implementation works for you, and for many it will, then great, but it’s a little misleading on their part. Their marketing hype and blogging made it sound like they’ve created a full fledged vmware replacement, and that’s not the case. They’ve simply implemented what is generally held to be an unstable technology under very controlled circumstances to give the appearance of being a stable technology. If it works, then it works, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hardly the realization of Xen’s potential, and that’s what Red Hat was referring to.
Basically it’s Xgl for server rooms. Cool technology that works under limited circumstances, generating much hype but not yet ready for prime time.
People overlook the fact that Novell’s implementation of Xen will only work with virtualized versions of SLES. So you can run a virutalized version of your Novell OS under your Novell OS.
Good point. Novell is primarily using Xen to run Netware virtualised running under Linux (certainly in OES), simply because they don’t want to support Netware on real hardware anymore.
Edited 2006-08-11 17:28
You claim Red Hat is spreading FUD, yet you do not say how the Novell packages are better and why the ones from RH suck… Isn’t much better than FUD, now isn’t it?
It would be nice to know, especially since some people (including me) are very interested in Xen.
Markus Rex is not Novell’s CTO. That dubious honour goes to a ‘highly knowledgable’ person called Jeffrey Jaffe:
http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/
Commentary by many people has stated that Xen just isn’t ready yet, although it has created excitement. Whether excitement has been mistaken for stable, I don’t know. Xen just hasn’t seen enough deployment out in the field yet, and getting it installed and set up is one really long and drawn out task.
Xen doesn’t yet have any decent management tools of any description like VMware which is essential in an enterprise product (many would rather just buy VMware for that alone), and performing tasks like adding and removing hardware on a virtual machine is still pretty unstable. They also seem to have a bugs list that never seems to get smaller:
http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?query_format=spe…
Not to mention that Xensource isn’t the usual open source organisation people think of when they think of open source. They are a corporation that is, and has, burned up serious amounts of VC money (http://xensource.com/company/ – look at the VCs), taking on offices at $5,000 a month and making lots of truly ludicrous decisions like using the future Microsoft hypervisor.
Yer, yer. I know that Xensource is separate from the Xen community, but it’s silly to think that things like this aren’t having a detrimental effect on the software overall. Unfortunately, it seems that the venture capital fuelled soundbites about Xen being ready have been making their way to people who really should be able to see the forest for the trees:
http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/?p=19
Edited 2006-08-11 13:22
The real bad news is that Markus Rex is CTO of Novell. OMG. Glad I sold all my NOVL stock when I did.
This is an example of the difference in thinking between proprietary and open source people. Novell says “Xen is stable because we have partners who support it, and we support it.” Open source fans will generally say something is stable only when it runs stably. We tend to use an imperical test whereas Novell and others of their traditional, closed ilk use a “did we sign off on it?” test. If they signed off on it, it *must* be good enough. Otherwise, they are incompetent or liars.
Always consider the source of these claims when you hear them. When Linus says “It’s stable” I believe that it works flawlessly and has been proven to do so in the real world. When Microsoft, Novell, or any company bound up in traditional to-market software says “It’s stable” I have and will believe that they mean “It has been released” and nothing more.