Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Some Assembly Required (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Some Assembly Required (eWeek)

Posted Apr 10, 2007 15:20 UTC (Tue) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

Arrgg... eWeek's reviews of Linux products/technology is always poor.

I wish they would have some writers that have half a clue.

Whilst some points they make about the Xen implementation in RHELv5 are valid most are due to the fact they don't understand Xen.

It seems to have been written by a Windows 'point-n-click' admin.

Most enterprises that use RHEL in their business would not have got tripped up on the mistakes they made.
The majority of enterprises use kickstart to build their instances and something the RHEL build does do well. You can have your Xen based RHEL image up in a matter of minutes with a decent kickstart build.

RHELv5 isn't a bad build and does add fit nicely into a RHEL network particularly those wishing to move into virtualization and haven't gone down the VMWare route as such.

I suspect as more tech writers play with the features we're likely to see more informed reviews.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Some Assembly Required (eWeek)

Posted Apr 10, 2007 22:25 UTC (Tue) by pspinler (subscriber, #2922) [Link]

> Most enterprises that use RHEL in their business would not have got
> tripped up on the mistakes they made.
> The majority of enterprises use kickstart to build their instances and
> something the RHEL build does do well. You can have your Xen based RHEL
> image up in a matter of minutes with a decent kickstart build.

Well, these problems caught me. I'm not yet Xen savvy, and still in a kicking the tires mode, and I'm finding that I can't follow the Redhat examples in their own manuals. Further, their document is just plain wrong about some things, such as the command line tools sub-commands.

I mean, come on, all I wanna do is build a simple xen guest, and compare it to our existing vmware infrastructure. Unfortunately, redhat's loosing this war at our shop.

-- Pat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Some Assembly Required (eWeek)

Posted Apr 10, 2007 23:26 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I'm not sure why you are so defensive about this, Red Hat needs to be able to sell these features on
their own merits. I think that eWeek did a pretty decent job in reviewing this, comparing to other
similar products and documenting the pitfalls one would likely run into during initial setup of
common use cases. To say that the authors aren't _real_ admins and don't have a clue and that
they are only running into these rough edges because they don't "understand" Xen is rediculous.
The problems they ran into during setup are ones that I need to be aware of and would probably
have run into myself had I been doing the testing, they also indicate to me that this feature is not
yet fully baked according to my expectations and I will probably need to wait for a few Update
releases for all of these rough edges to be filed down.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Some Assembly Required (eWeek)

Posted Apr 11, 2007 0:26 UTC (Wed) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]

As primary upstream maintainer of virt-manager I can say that eWeek did raise a number of valid points that we already have on our TODO list for ongoing development.

The latest upstream code for virt-manager already addresses the issue of the virtual CDROM media not being connected after the first reboot of Windows guests. We have also recently been doing a lot of work to expand the options for guest networking.

Remote management is also a very important feature we'd like to be able to enable asap. The reality, though, is that current Xen releases do not offer a *secure* API to remotely manage virtual machines. Xen 3.0.3 is provides a HTTP XML-RPC service but this is unencrypted and has no authentication so it is not practical to make use of this. Some existing tools tunnel this insecure protocol over SSH, but this is not a long term sustainable approach, and still misses some of the hardware discovery APIs that are critical for remote managment to be functionally equivalent to local management.

The latest development snapshot of the forthcoming Xen 3.0.5 (not yet released) now has SSL + user/password authentication which is a huge step forward. The libvirt project is also developing a secure RPC mechanism for remote management of QEMU, KVM and Xen virtual machines. Until either of those options are available in official release it isn't practical to enable remote management in virt-manager.

NB, when these improvements make their way into a future RHEL release is a more open question. The virt-manager build in RHEL-5 had the broadest level of supportable functionality available given the constraints around timing of RHEL-5 GA. Upstream development is obviously ongoing & thus new functionality will appear in periodic virt-manager releases & filter down to the various distros shipping the app.