Novell accuses Red Hat of flip-flopping on Xen

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Aug. 17, 2006

A virtual war is brewing up between Red Hat and Novell on how ready Xen is for business use. In the latest development, Novel CTO Jeff Jaffe has accused Red Hat of flip-flopping in its support for the popular Linux virtualization software.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens recently accused Novell of "being cavalier [with Xen]. We know what we need to be enterprise-ready and we already have a checklist of everything we need for that. They [Novell] have decided it's more important to be first. That's fine and maybe makes sense for them,"

Novell has an entirely different take on the matter.

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe said of Red Hat's accusations that, "Red Hat has adopted the John Kerry approach to virtualization: constant flip-flopping. Let's not forget," he continued, "that until recently Red Hat not only supported Xen, they wanted it to be part of Linux."

In October 2005, Stevens had said that part of the Red Hat emerging technology team's efforts would be to implement Xen virtualization as part of the Linux kernel, rather than as part of a sidebar project.

Xen technology lets users run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware, allowing for the better utilization of resources.

Jaffe went on to say that any company considering a corporate switch to Xen, or any other major server or virtualization platform, should not "make a buy now, but test out SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 and try it out for four to six months." By then, they'll know that Xen works well and can answer their needs, Jaffe suggested.

"Xen," Jaffe said, "also has the industry momentum and support needed to continue to drive virtualization prices down."

Even now, Jaffe continued, insurance giant Nationwise is using Novell SLES and Xen in production IBM zSeries mainframes to improve their system utilization and save money.

While Novell does have other virtualization partners, such as VMWare and Virtual Iron, which offer solutions that might work better for some customers, Jaffe is certain that Xen is more than ready to ship with SLES and that it is exactly the virtualization solution that some customers need today no matter what Red Hat make think.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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