More VMware FUD about Xen

Official Citrix Blog > Citrites > Simon Crosby > More VMware FUD about Xen

19 Feb 2008 02:21 PM EST

posted in XenServer - Server Virtualization by Simon Crosby

With both my Citrix XenServer and Xen community hats on at once, I have to salute another piece of creative writing from the VMware competitive misinformation department. This time it's about CPU architectures and live relocation (which we call XenMotion, just because we can). The piece states that we don't check CPU compatibility on migration of a VM between servers. This is ridiculous, because if we didn't VMs would be crashing about our ears when we do live relocations. Both in XenServer and in open source Xen, we require a match on CPU processor vendor, family and stepping before a migration can be performed.

I'm beginning to understand why the VMware blog is called "A little truth...". While I'm all for competitive intelligence in general, when the code is available in open source for everyone to review, it's just not possible to pull the wool over everyone's eyes like this.

And though I know this has hit the wires before, I keep hearing from VMware customers that are buying XenServer why they love the simplicity and robustness of our product and of Xen: The total number of patches shipped to date for XenServer: 0. Total hot fixes and patches shipped last year for VMware VI3/ESX alone: 68*!* of which 17 were critical. Silly me! Those were probably only "feature enhancements".

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you go boy

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Posted by Anonymous at May 17, 2008 10:00 | Reply To This

More Power to you Simon .

Posted by Anonymous at Feb 19, 2008 16:37 | Reply To This

Simon,

You may have a valid point about the post made by this Vmware guy. However if you think this is going to sway someone from buying Xen think again.

As someone who has used and sold Vmware for many years, there are many...many reasons why Xen is not up to scratch yet. Yes you may have less patches, and perform better or pretty much the same as Vmware in terms of performance. However Xen is far from enterprise ready so I don't you should go there with this debate as you surely must know the current limitations of Xen vs Vmware.

PS:I am also a Citrix man, however providing an enterprise ready solution has to be one of the most important factors for my solutions. In previous ESX versions of yesterday, this challange was also true.

Posted by Anonymous at Feb 19, 2008 16:58 | Reply To This

"...many...many reasons..." Such as?? Please be specific.

Posted by Anonymous at Feb 19, 2008 17:31 | Reply To This

Simon,

Being a Xen customer I totally agree with your comments of ease of use. I am a great user of Xen and love it. But unfortunately we could not use it for our enterprise workloads due to weird and wonderful issues that even down to this day no one could sort out. One of those issues being vm migrations. Sure it may check cpu's but the checks must not be performed at the same level as ESX. As a result, Xen migrations would only work around 50% of the time which was unacceptable to the business. So to cut a long story short, ESX VI3 is what we use for our enterprise workloads and Xen for non critical applications. ESX just works. We perform about 100+ VMotions a day thanks to DRS rules and this has been running solidly now for over 6 months with no downtime what so ever. To our business and I am sure most business's out there, UPTIME IS Critical. Xen just does not have the robustness and maturity...yet!

Hopefully with a bit of time this will change for the Xen product.

Regards.

Posted by Anonymous at Feb 19, 2008 17:42 | Reply To This

The checks are actually done at EXACTLY the same level as VMware's. The difference is that we do it at pool join time. So if you joined the pool and TOLD us to ignore the checks... well, you get what happens when you ignore the checks.

Posted by Roger Klorese at Feb 19, 2008 18:45 | Reply To This

Let me clarify my points earlier and some of my many reasons.

1. No centralised logging system. I perform a Xenmotion and my co-worker is not aware I have done so

2. Limited GUI. Ok so you can perform a Xenmotion and add storage easily.

3. No granular access control

4. Limited OS support (almost all server consolidations I have done have NT4 servers in !)

5. Limited network bonding/vlans

6. Very poor templating/sysprep intergration

Yes I have read the release notesof 4.1, but I have not seen it working live yet.

What I really want to see is an honest comparison between ESX. Not of performance, or even the 'must have' features such as XXmotion but more the things people take forgranted.

Citrix can then let us know how they progress over the years

Posted by Anonymous at Feb 21, 2008 16:13 | Reply To This

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