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Re: [Xen-users] RedHat 5 is out today, includes Xen

To: "Luke S. Crawford" <lsc@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] RedHat 5 is out today, includes Xen
From: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 07:21:14 -0000
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Luke S. Crawford wrote:
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
So I've just been contacted by RedHat about OS licensing: they took
down my name when I told them that doing Xen for RHEL 4 was
prohibitively expensive with their one license/guest domain, and I
was currently using CentOS on quite a few systems because of this
and because up2date sucks so very hard, and because RedHat support
is less useful than my own experience and the open source venues for
particular software (like Xen itself!)

RHEL5 uses yum, not up2date.  An improvement, IMHO.

I think they still *have* up2date. But they've integrated a an registration macro into Yum to allow access to their software repositories. Mind you. We'll see how fast it is in practice.

They listened, and called me back to give me pricing for RHEL 5
servers and domains. I've played with the 4.92 beta, and it's not
bad: the hypervisor is still fairly silly in a bunch of ways because
it prevents much control over the paravirtual environment or with
setting up multiple exported images as multiple disks in the Xen
environment, or with exporting one mountable image as one partition
instead of building internal partitions. (Useful for some tasks,
trust me on this!)

As far as I can tell, all of the limitations in the RedHat gui can be
overcome by using the command line tools;  RedHat includes the
standard Xen xm tools;  it just has a nice gui on top that can handle
a subset of the xm tool's functionality to make things easy.   If you
drop to a shell prompt, the xm tools work just like on a standard
Xen3 install.

Sure, I can build and edit a Xen environment by editing the config files myself. It's the GUI that I'd like to have available for the less skilled or experienced sys-admin. The lack of complete and well-documented management tools for Xen hurts its acceptance: I highly recommend Eric Raymond's old rant about open source GUI's based on his experience with CUPS, and my notes that he added to it, for notes on how to make them better.

But it's not bad. Anyone else out there planning on using it?

I have one client that has been using it since beta2;  if you have
money and don't have the ability to identify or retain good Linux
nerds, RedHat is an excellent choice.  The support my client gets is
pretty good.

It's..... expensive for anything more than 30 days if installation support. It's a bit awkward to figure out RedHat pricing: they don't like to lay it out in a single table, but to split it into lots of different tables so you have to drill down to find it.

Me, I don't have money, so I'll try the CentOS 5 variety out, if
nothing else, then to get some practice.  but I will probably end up
using slack for my Dom0 and whatever the customer wants for the DomU.

(does anyone use DSL or another embedded distribution for the Dom0?)

I like CentOS. I actually find the open source support for it to be better than the commercial support for CentOS, but I'm not asking newbie questions or using high-end wildly high-availability platforms of doom.

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