Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Why Red Hat says Xen isn't ready yet

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Why Red Hat says Xen isn't ready yet

TAGS: Infrastructure

News.com reported earlier today on Red Hat VP Alex Pinchev's comments on XenSource and why Red Hat isn't rolling it into RHEL just yet.

"XenSource is not stable yet, it's not ready for the enterprise," Pinchev told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet Australia on Monday.
"We don't feel that XenSource is stable enough to address banking, telco or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it," he added.

Now The Register adds detail from an Illuminata report:

1. The new "credit scheduler" was just checked into the xen-unstable tree earlier this month. SLE10 shipped with two other schedulers (BVT and sEDF). According to this posting by Keir Fraser (one of the original developers of Xen): "With the new credit scheduler checked into the xen-unstable tree, I wouldn't recommend to use either BVT or SEDF. They're both buggy. The new scheduler is supported by us, automatically load balances on SMP systems, and has a simpler administrator interface. Once credit scheduler has demonstrated its stability we'll most likely remove the other two schedulers."
2. The SLE10 installer is primarily just for SUSE guests at this point. "...for Windows you have to use the manual approach by editing config files and changing entries to boot from CD/HD."
3. Performance profiling (xenoprof) is still in flux. e.g., it doesn't save or restore performance counter state on context switching (so it's difficult to profile performance within guest OSs).
4. According to Red Hat: "Xen security is an issue [that] Xen currently has no concept of: opening up the migration port, for example, will expose all of the guests to anybody on the network. (Imagine driving a server truck into a corporate parking lot, migrating all the instances to your servers, and driving off ;-).)"

This whole thing is a bit confusing, especially as I attended the Red Hat Integrated Virtualization launch where XenSource and Red Hat were all chummy. Don't ask me. I just blog here.

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 31, 2006 07:49 PM

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