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

["Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

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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