Lxlabs is not a real company. Did you visit their website? Do they have customers?

Kurt, I did visit their Web site. Is there something I am missing? Was it supposed to 404 on me? They claim to have customers on it. What are we supposed to be looking for?

Why aren't they a real company? Please explain.

Hey David,

You know Kurt is right. We are not a "real" company. All we have done is deliver robust, scalable, distributed, exquisitely architectured and easy to install and use applications that are openly available for everyone to download. All we are doing is providing bug fixes within 30 minutes, critical feature requests in 1 hour, and responding to our customer queries with 5 minutes. And of course, we don't have customers. We have people who are crazy about our software, people who are betting their entire livelihood and future on our software; people who were paying us license fees when the software was in RC, and despite our refusal. We don't have customers, but we have more than 40 production installations within the first 3 weeks of our software that is in version 1.2, and that too relying solely on word-of-mouth. We have people who are running both openvz and Xen side by side, and even migrating vpses from one to another. (HyperVM currently allows 100% transparent migration between openvz and Xen).

I think according to Kurt, a company is "real" only if it is teeming with clueless sales drones whose sole purpose is to batter and haggle with the customer to find out what's the maximum that they can be made to pay, while keeping your actual prices 'confidential'. And then making silly statements on their websites that are directly culled from the Microsoft sales manual.

But why all the speculation? Our softwares are open to download. You can register at our license manager for free, and actually start using the applications in production without ever contacting us. We have demos for both of our applications. You can visit our forum, which is a microcosm of our total customer portfolio, and find for yourself what's the situation. I guess, these are all irrelevant to Kurt here. What galls him is that we don't have any silly 'sales-speak' anywhere in our website, and this goes against his ingrained intuition of what a 'real' company is.

But all this is irrelevant. Success of hyperVM has meant that in a couple of months, we will also be a 'real' company with all the absurdities and the excesses. In fact, what we are trying our best is to not turn into a 'real' company, but I don't think we have a choice.

Thanks.

K T Ligesh

I'm not going to respond in detail, since I was merely reacting to those funny phrases/word choice in this company's press release above

Extra funny that they 1) first attack the clear market leader in this area without backing up their claims and 2) then go on to support OpenVZ from their tools (OpenVZ being the "heart" of Virtuozzo and an SWsoft-supported project)

So it seems we are partners now...

Hi Kurt,

Contrary to what you are claiming now, your first comment here didn't touch the press release at all, but rather you just accused lxlabs of being a non-real company. Hey, we are unreal. We are adding features every hour, and we just released the world's lightest web hosting platform, something that can run in 15MB RAM. I am surprised why swsoft didn't come up with such a software, since it took us mere 3 days to port our existing application to low memory mode, and this is something that could have tremendously helped virtuozzo sales.

But I am digressing. The fact is, we had plans to write our own container implementation, but we didn't think we were capable of keeping the source code under the wrap for so long like you did, since GPL mandates open sourcing any modifications to the linux kernel. In fact, we switched from custom kernel development to building web interface software primarily because of our reluctance at violating the GPL. Companies flat out told us that there was no IP in linux kernel.

The specific comment in the press release was about the lack of per vps swap in virtuozzo, which prevents graceful degradation of services, and actually results in a lot of confusion and conflicts. Just look at all the posts in webhostingtalk. In fact, the whole forum is replete with nightmare stories, and the primary cause is the lack of full isolation. Once Xen matures, it will be a significant competitor, since it provides full isolation. The comment was about virtuozzo's specific drawback (lack of per vps swap), and I think it is something your developer's themselves admit--at least from what I read in their blogs, where I see a refrain of how os level and hardware level virtualizations are complementary. But most importantly, I would think the comment voiced in the press release was self evident from swsoft's attempt at transmogrifying itself from a virtuozzo based virtualization company to a multi-virtualization Management solutions company.

Virtuozzo has an advantage that it makes controlling the vps from the host very trivial, which is very important for mass management, at the same time it has a disadvantage that it doesn't allow per vps swap.

As for the appropriateness of the statement, I think it is similar to swsoft's comments about VMware (a clear market leader) being unsuitable for many tasks, and yet planning to add vmware management capabilities into your software suit. :-)

Just an addendum:

I am not trying to judge Swsoft here. Actually, they did make an attempt to present virtuozzo to the linux kernel mailing list some time in 2000, but it seems "Nobody cared". So I am in no way trying to pass judgement here, merely saying that GPL makes kernel hacking an unprofitable enterprise, at least for small companies who don't have the marketing clout to work out an 'open source business model'.