RE: [Xen-users] The death of XEN by Novell

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> Subject: The death of XEN by Novell (case number 10406546031)
> 
> According to Novell, Xen has a flaw that in fact means it is useless.

Is this your interpretation of Novell's response or have Novell come out
and said that "Our product is useless"? Are you able to paste the text
of the support ticket or is it bound by some confidentiality agreement?

> 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.

Can you tell us more about the crash?

Was it really simultaneous (as best as you can tell) or did the domains
just crash at about the same time?

What errors were in the logs (xm dmesg, dmesg, /var/log/xen/*)?

Did Dom0 crash as well?

The only time I've had more than one domain crash near-simultaneously
was when the oom-killer decided that the qemu-dm processes weren't
important and killed them to free up memory.

> 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.

Can you post a link to that technical note? Is it ">1 CPU leads to
crashes", or ">1 CPU may lead to crashes on this specific hardware under
these specific conditions"? Is it a Novell specific problem or a more
general problem? 

> 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 10406546031

Was this an invitation to internal Novell support personal or is it
viewable by anyone?

Are you actually after assistance here or just sounding off? (that's a
genuine question, imho everyone is allowed to spit the dummy once in a
while.)

Also, Novell aren't the only suppliers of Xen solutions...

James


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