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

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 12:28:45AM -0400, Venefax wrote:
> The Novell engineer showed me, and it has been confirmed in this list, that
> Windows with more than one virtual CPU crashes. An crashing it did. I woke
> up with angry calls from customers and when I logged in, all my 3 Windows
> VM's (two windows 2008 Datacenter with 32 GB and 8 VCPU and one Windows 2003
> Enterprise with 16 GB and 8 VCPU's)  were in blue screen. The memory dump
> process was stuck I guess because since the hard drives use the Novell
> para-virtualized drivers, then at a blue-screen time you cannot collect any
> memory dump. But the fact is that the engineer showed me that advisory note
> in the Novell web site, saying I had been wasting my time, and now I am
> buying a second $15.000 box to relocate my three windows VM´s. This is joke.
>

Does Novell advertise their Xen in SLES supports Windows SMP? 

"Confirmed in this list" .. can you please send a link to such email? 

Is there a bugzilla entry about this bug in Novell's bug database or Xensource's
bugzilla? 

-- Pasi
 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Harper [mailto:james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 12:08 AM
> To: Venefax; Mark Williamson; Antoine Benkemoun; Ky Srinivasan; Lynn
> Bendixsen
> Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; stephen.spector@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [Xen-users] The death of XEN by Novell
> 
> > 
> > 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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