Posted on 08/11/2006 6:35:34 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Novell chief technology officer (CTO) 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.
At Novell's Sydney office on Thursday, Rex responded to claims by Linux competitor Red Hat that Xen was not stable enough to be deployed in enterprise environments. Novell has claimed to be the first vendor to include Xen in its Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Xen, primarily developed by US-based start-up XenSource, allows users to run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware.
"If you look at the Xen open source project, we have been the number two contributor during the past 10 months or so to that project. So we've kind of contributed most of the enterprise readiness for the Xen platform," Rex said.
Red Hat only had to look at Novell's launch of its new server for testimony that Xen was enterprise ready, according to Rex.
"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."
Novell had a track record of being the first to expand the Linux platform, while competitors had often claimed the additions weren't ready, he said.
"It's up to each vendor on when to include certain technologies," Rex said.
"We always have been very much on the forefront of technology, so I think it's just fitting that we have been the first ones to integrate Xen."
However, despite its self-proclaimed pace-setter status, Novell has not yet completed rolling out Linux desktops to all its employees. The vendor announced the plans over two years ago.
Rex said the rollout was "still an ongoing process", but that the company was on track with its two year old goals.
"The whole company has been using OpenOffice now for about a year, roughly.
"[This] was the far more painful transition than [changing] the actual underlying operating system because it's the day to day application that you use and it touches all your file formats and everything."
Novell had "80 something percent" of its people with Linux on their desktops, Rex said.
The rollout in Novell China was complete; "most of" Novell Germany was done, and "virtually all" of Novell's technical teams around the world ran Linux on the desktop, he said.
Some Novell staff would still use Windows in addition to Linux on the desktop for certain functions, such as software development, said Rex.
Novell executives also downplayed the recent replacement of the company's chief executive and chief financial officers.
"There have been a couple of different phases inside Novell," said Rex.
"And each of the different phases had its unique needs."
Initially a Windows software company, Novell turned to Linux-based software when it completed the acquisition of SUSE Linux in 2004.
"Now we've reached the next phase. And each of the phases have different people doing the key decisions," said Rex.
"I've been involved with all three phases and I've worked with all three groups of people.
"It was not necessarily so much different ... it's like a constant evolving.
"Whether it's better off or worse off [without former CEO Jack Messman], this is something I cannot really say."
Messman was replaced by Ron Hovsepian, formerly Novell's chief operating officer.
Have you tried out their server product? That's what I'm using on my laptop (and generally in my group, though we still have one 'workstation' holdout). I don't fully understand why they are charging for workstation and not server right now. Seems weird.
Same here. I liked Kubuntu, but I need my wife to test drive it before I change our laptops over. FC5 has some weirdnesses that have kept me from going to it on the laptops, which are still on FC4. At work, I have to connect to one of those evil 'exchange' servers, and FC5 broke on that completely. Evolution locks up every time I try to pull mail. Spent over an hour today off and on beating up my installation to get it to cooperate because I'm sick to death of webmail, to no avail. I may have to drop back to FC4 on this box, which sucks because I like the wireless tools on FC5 better.
I can believe that!
We're in the process of upgrading (and relocating) our datacenter, and are planning on some fairly beefy systems that are going to be partitioned out via VMware. We're going to be telling our developers as little as we can get away with.
Because the new free Server version isn't as good. It's comparatively buggy, unstable, and doesn't have the same quantity of features. Yes the new post beta version.
Wasn't it Novell that single - handedly destroyed Word Perfect? I always figured them to be Microsoft pawns.
I just always assumed it lost to the market forces and Word.
WordDefect was already circling the drain when Novell got it. It (WP) never adapted to the Windows desktop. Novell got some great real estate out of it, but lost a lot of money in the process. Novell dumped it off on Corel and I think Corel has since dumped on someone else.
People are just calmly discussing the actual issue of the article, and you just have to jump in with your anti-OSS rhetoric.
You might be able to help me out here. I've used virtuals for medium server farms (1 app server, 2 app servers in failover, cluster of 2 DB servers, and a few more), and so far I haven't found anything I can't do with MS Virtual Server. But then I don't know if I'm even pushing the envelope to where the differences between MS and VMWare would show.
Any reason to recommend VMWare over Virtual Server except for VMWare running on other host OSs besides Windows?
As a developer I can tell you that may come back to bite you later, especially if you're dealing with system timings or drivers. You are safer if they're only writing high-level stuff, but there's still no guarantee.
WP was dying before Novell because they took too long to get a Windows version out, and when they did it sucked. There is contention over whether this was just WP Corp blowing it or whether Microsoft hid critical information about programming for Windows from WP Corp so that Word could get ahead in the Windows word processing market. Novell sued Microsoft over this (although they owned WP for less than two years), but I haven't heard of a conclusion yet.
This concerns both the daily maintennance stuff, like creating, cloning, managing and backing up virtural instances, as well as more sophisticated features like 'vmotion'.
What vmotion lets you do is take a live system, and migrate it from one phyiscal server to another while the system is live. Intellegently implemeted, this could virtually eliminate downtime for anything but actions which require a boot of the image, like OS patches. We're working on gaining confidence of this feature in our production environment, though the more paranoid among us haven't really bought off on it yet. However, once you do it, you can maximize hardware utilization by having servers move hither and yon based on load. For instance, if you've got a server that does serious batch work at night, it might not be allocated to a given piece of hardware during the day, but instead is migrated there at night to take advantage of the fact that some of the other servers are less active at night.
Our MS-Windows team looked at the MS offering and quickly rejected it as inadequate to the task of where we wanted to go with virtualization.
I didn't mean it in that way, though our developers aren't really writing device drivers or other low-level stuff like that. I just don't want them to have overly optimistic expectations of what we can deploy to our new hardware. You know how it is with them delvelopers. They'll eat all the resources you can throw at them. :-)
Thanks for the info. I only use it for development and testing, so I don't think I need VMWare's production management abilities. I may go play with the latest VMWare, but I'll probably be sticking with Microsoft.
Cool. Whatever works for ya. Keep in mind though that in the future, if you want to switch from the Dark Side, VMware has tools to convert MS-VS servers to VMware. :-)
Maybe, but I'm happy with what I've got for now. Unlike certain unnamed metallic avians here, I don't choose software based on philosophy, which means Microsoft isn't automatically excluded.
Is it a full hardware/software virtualization environment? By that I mean that when I fire up an instance under VMware, I actually see a full post from the BIOS up in the VM.
A month or so ago, this kindof bit me in the rear. On my workstation at home, my wife complained that she couldn't login to the desktop. I figured she'd hosed her password on it or something, so I logged in and was going to change her password for her, when it started complaining that her username didn't exist. "Strange", thought I . I looked in /etc/passwd and sure enough she wasn't there. Her home directory didn't exist in /home. Additionally, a quick look at 'df' didn't show quite all the drives I was expecting. I was not a very happy camper at that point, thinking something had really blown up bad on my desktop box. So I figured, what the heck, I'll reboot and see if it shows any weirdness on startup that would help me figure out what happened to the drives (I didn't do any serious forensics prior to trying this because the wife-unit was wanting to do something on it.)
The system shutdown cleanly... then rebooted.... with a big "VMware" graphic during the POST.
I'd forgotten that I'd left a test copy of FC5 running in full screen mode. DOH!
It does POST. It used to do it so fast you couldn't see it and therefore may have thought it wasn't there, but now they've made it so you can see what's happening.
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