If you sunk $35K on Novell’s word about windows working in Xen,
you would not be so “reasonable” about it. You would get kind of emotional.
From: Nick Couchman
[mailto:Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 5:05 PM
To: 'Mark Williamson'; 'Antoine Benkemoun'; Venefax; 'Ky Srinivasan';
'Lynn Bendixsen'
Cc: stephen.spector@xxxxxxxxxx; xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] The death of XEN by Novell
This sounds to
me like an emotional (over)reaction to a bug in Xen. I have also run
across this flaw in Xen (Novell's version of it, anyway - don't know if all of
the Xen versions are tainted) and have resigned myself to running my
multi-processor Windows VMs on my VMware ESX servers instead of on XEN.
Yes, it's annoying, and yes I can see how you'd me a little ticked off
after losing so much time to it, but, Xen still functions perfectly fine on
SLES10 SP2 for me - I have four physical machines, all running SLES10 SP2 with
somewhere on the order of 40 or so domUs on those four machines, and plenty of
capacity to spare. Very useful, not dead. And, probably 25 of those
40 domUs are HVM domUs running Windows XP. One of them is Solaris, and
the rest are various versions of Linux. So, to recap:
1) Yes, there's
a bug in there somewhere that makes running a multi-processor Windows-based HVM
crash.
2) You can still
run Windows on XEN - maybe just not in your environment.
3) XEN is still
very, very useful - maybe just not for what you're trying to do right now.
4) XEN is not
dead, nor is it dieing, even if Novell has done something to hose it up a
little.
5) If you spent
$35K on the hardware you can probably afford to spend another few thousand on
VMware ESX and run your multi-processor Windows VMs on there.
-Nick
>>> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:10 AM, "Venefax"
<venefax@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
According to Novell, Xen has
a flaw that in fact means it is useless. I have a single supported system with
SLES SP2, where I have 3 Windows VM's and 5 Linux VM's. In each of the Windows
VM's I have 8 Virtual CPU's, because I have a vital SQL Server installed where
my company runs all its business. The data comes precisely from the Linux
virtual machines, and having the database "right there" has proven
extremely efficient. But all my three Windows VM's crashed simultaneously
yesterday and I lost two hours of business. I am using of course the right
Novell drivers, etc., every piece of the puzzle in place. Novell already
checked that. The engineers showed me a technical note that says that having
more than one Virtual CPU in a Windows VM leads to crashes. But then we cannot
have any windows VM at all, hello!!! This means that the $35.000 box that I
bought is the wrong box, because now I need to remove my windows VM and create
a separate windows installation, and order more hardware, spend more money. It
means that XEN is useless, because if it only can virtualize Linux, actually
Virtuozzo (Open VZ) has a lot less overhead, far less. The beauty of Xen is
that it is supposed to virtualize Windows and Linux together. Now, that dream
is gone. In case somebody wants to look at my Novell case number, it is
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