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Oracle 'Losing Patience' with XenSource, VMware

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 01, 2006 08:37 AM
from the just-hug-and-make-up dept.
Linux Business Software Operating Systems IT
HiTech writes "eWeek has an article looking at Oracle's frustration with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together. The goal is to develop a single interface for virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel. Oracle's comments follow those by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman at Oscon last week that XenSource and VMware were butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution. Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of products and alliances, admits the company had been approached by a neutral third party for offline mediation to establish how best to make this happen. But Simon Crosby, the CTO for XenSource, rules out any mediation, saying he believes the two companies are committed to solving the real technical issues."
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  • Compromise (Score:4, Insightful)

    by neonprimetime (528653) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @08:41AM (#15824480)
    Getting the two companies to talk to one another and work together has been requiring mediation by neutral parties

    Seriously people, this is computer software we're talking about, not Israel and Hezbollah. I think they can come to a compromise pretty soon here.

    • Re:Compromise (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2006, @08:50AM (#15824510)
      Not necessarily. Linux seems to be about new ideas and reinventing the wheel. Why are there so many file systems for example? There are valid reasons to have different interfaces. Perhaps different performance characteristics or access to system devices might be an issue. It takes serious planning and commitment not to change the api. The linux changelog suggests this is a big problem for some. The argument that its better doesn't always cut it.. why do you think windows is bloated?
      • Well, that's kind of to be expected: when you get right down to it, the whole premise of Linux was a reinvention of the wheel. It's a clone of an operating system that already existed -- it doesn't get much more re-inventive than that.

        However, if there's anything we can learn from that, it's that sometimes there are benefits to re-inventing something that already exists, and in some cases may already seem to work okay. What seems like a complete waste of time to one person might create a result that's just different enough in some way to be really useful to somebody. (In the case of Linux, to a lot of us anyway, it was Unix but without the high cost and crappy licensing, and with the ability to see the source; hugely significant to some people but I'm sure it looked totally redundant to Unix people.)

        Sometimes reinvention is necessary. You make a good point though, that there does seem to be a lot of it going on at any given time, and maybe that doesn't need to be the case here -- in any event, it seems like the reasons for taking parallel roads to the same place rather than working together should be carefully considered.
      • Not necessarily. Linux seems to be about new ideas and reinventing the wheel. Why are there so many file systems for example? There are valid reasons to have different interfaces.

        Indeed. Why are there so many filesystems? Because there are good reasons for it. Some filesystems, like ISO9660, provide access to standards-based media (CDs, DVDs), others like ext3 are intended to provide advanced features like journalling and still retain backward compatibility with ext2 utilities. Still others, like ReiserFS and XFS are intended to provide the most advanced features and highest performance possible; ReiserFS as an overall enterprise-class server filesystem and XFS provides excellent performance for streaming media applications. JFS tries to add compatibility with AIX5L. Each filesystem addresses a different need.

        This is also true of Xen vs. VMWare. VMWare was originally geared at doing desktop stuff; they later tuned things for server virtualization; but the aim has always been to provide as much compatibility with all the major guest and host operating systems. Xen is aimed at doing server virtualization with maximum performance -- the number and types of guest OSes isn't as important, as Xen basically only supports running Linux on Linux. Other OSes may work as well, but the main goals are different.

    • Re:Compromise (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ant P. (974313) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:19AM (#15824660) Homepage
      As long as they both write their code using vim, I don't care which one I use.

    • Are you kidding? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Moraelin (679338) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @10:35AM (#15825155) Journal
      Seriously people, this is computer software we're talking about, not Israel and Hezbollah.


      You're kidding, right? This is computer software, the battleground of OCPD [wikipedia.org] personalities, where one aspect is taken out of context and used to judge something into "perfect" and "complete evil" categories, with no middle ground. And then proceed to try to raise a crusade to death against the complete evil ones. It's the place where vi vs emacs, KDE vs Gnome, Java vs C++, Intel vs AMD, goto vs for/while loops, and of course OSS vs anything else isn't just worth a debate, but become religious wars and things to fight to death for or against.

      I bet that when your stereotypical ultra-militant extremist-Islamist organization's meetings go out of hands, someone could interject "stop it guys, you're starting to sound like on the OpenBSD mailing lists." And, assuming they've even heard of OpenBSD, the previously screaming and fist-shaking speakers would blush and start staring at their own shoes in silence.

      In fact, if the Hesbolah vs Israel _were_ like the software holy wars, God help us, because there's be no possibility of peace ever. I could just see a peace talks turning into "ok, you may have aggreed to free Palestine, pay reparations, change your language to Arabic, convert to Islamic faith, recognize the Ayatolah's authority and everything... but... YOU RUN YOUR SERVERS ON WINDOWS! DIE INFIDEL!!!"
      • More precisely, to increase their investissor's stock value. Not necessarly by making money, but flirting with Xen is probably not in their interest or goals right now. Too bad.

  • Of course.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 01 2006, @08:41AM (#15824486) Homepage Journal
    Oracle's interoperability with competing products is perfect. Yeesh.
    • This issue has nothing to do with interoperability. It is about getting changes into the Linux kernel. I don't see it as particularly (5, Insightful) to say: "Oracle isn't perfect therefore they shouldn't complain about other companies." Oracle is an influential company trying to solve a logjam slowing important technology adoption in Linux. Good for them!
      • This issue has nothing to do with interoperability. It is about getting changes into the Linux kernel.

        What? Nothing to do with interoperability? Xen and Vmware need to sit down & hammer out a shared API - but its nothing to do with interoperability?

        Imagine if the first line of the TFA was:

        VMware is fast losing its patience with both Oracle and Postgresql over their reluctance to work together to help develop a single interface that will integrate a variety of clustering filesystem solutions in the Linu

  • Impatience is a Virtue (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:03AM (#15824580) Homepage Journal
    I wish someone would get Xen and VMWare to work together for a single virtualization interface. Then they might be able to talk some sense into Oracle so there's a single SQL interface regardless of which SQL vendor or server or version or driver or language or OS...
    • Yep, like ODBC you mean?

      • Yes, there are SQL language standards (which are lamentably followed by commercial and open source databases at about a 7-year lag). But there are no standardized protocol interfaces for connecting to databases. So every different database requries a custom protocol driver of some sort. Even programming-language-specific but "standard" database APIs (ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, whatever) require a driver layer beneath them to speak the particualr database connection protocol needed.

        I recall reading about a Micros

        • I don't think you are running any really big (multi-terabyte) systems.

          Or the database is layed out and indexed correctly and you can get all the data you need, using basic SQL and you only need to pull a couple records at a time.

  • fleshing out the question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rodentia (102779) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:15AM (#15824635)
    The Reg is leading with a story putting meat [theregister.co.uk] on the bones of the contention in the article that Xen is *not ready for prime-time*.

    It will be interesting to see who's chumming, who's fishing and who's cutting bait when this boat comes in. Is it possible VMWare is trolling Oracle for an offer, playing hardball like this?

    • Re:fleshing out the question (Score:4, Funny)

      by mrchaotica (681592) * on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:25AM (#15824706)
      It will be interesting to see who's chumming, who's fishing and who's cutting bait when this boat comes in. Is it possible VMWare is trolling Oracle for an offer, playing hardball like this?

      Well, that mixed metaphor sure came out of left field!

  • I read 'offline meditation'. But then, maybe that's exactly what they need.

  • Typical. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pb (1020)
    VMWare wants a closed source interface, Xen wants an open source interface--what's to discuss, really? I'd love to see them hash it out on the LKML as proposed (and watch VMWare get flamed)... :)

    • Re:Typical. (Score:4, Informative)

      by InsaneGeek (175763) <slashdot@insan e g e e k s.com> on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:51AM (#15824845) Homepage
      Actually VMware suggested a documented, standardized, gernal interface that would allow closed-source binaries to talk to it. Xen want's an interface that is specific to Xen, that only Xen could use, effectively closing VMware and anyone else who would want to do virtualization that is any different than Xen from being in the kernel. If you believe that nobody could ever create a product better than Xen or if you believe that Xen will always have all the possible features that you could ever want in a hypervisor than you should support Xen specific patches in the kernel rather than a general interface.

  • Ego (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Honestly, XenSource seems to be taking much more of a "my way or the highway" approach, which is bizarre since their data center market penetration is about nil. Well, in a couple of years, when Microsoft discards them like a used kleenex, they'll hopefully learn. I hope it doesn't take that long.

    • Re:Ego (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jellomizer (103300) *
      Ego is Open Sources Greatest gift and it biggest fault. The reason a lot of people write Open Source Applications is so their name is on it and they get the warm and fuzzies that they are part of a larger application, or a widely used application. But it also causes people work hard to make sure their contribution is the most important and they will fight to the teath either right or wrong to get their contribution in.
      While closed source or people working in comerical their EGO is more professionally cont
    • All in all, OSS allows for a number of companies to move quickly by working together. But once a company or group wants to control it in an irresonible fashion, then it allows for it to be forked and done up right. XFree86 vs. Xorg is the best example of this. XenSource is a start-up based around Xen. But they do not have to be the only player. All it takes is another company to start-up and work with VmWare to create an interface and then mod Xen to it.

  • Part of the problem: Xen isn't baked yet (Score:4, Interesting)

    by postbigbang (761081) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:34AM (#15824763)
    Simon can complain all he wants, but we've had profound difficulties making their virtualization scheme work. It looks so tasty on paper, and yet Xen-modified kernels are unstable and feeble.

    The VMWare pressure, however, doesn't help. EMC/VMWare has a killer cadre of coders. They're very good and well paid, and can shift quickly to keep ahead of the market. Yes, it's largely NOT free open source software. Ok, it's free in some cases, but not OSS.

    Am I asking them not to beat up on Xen? Yes. It still needs to cook before it's going to be ready for prime time use. Until then, it's premature.

  • VMMs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thermostat42 (112272) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:42AM (#15824799) Homepage
    I'll re-ask the question I asked the panel at VEE this year:

    VMMs were created, in part because Operating Systems were unstable, incompatible, and often too big. Now we have all these VMMs that are unstable, incompatible, and trying to to more and more. So the question is:
    (1) What has the VMM community learned from the OS community, and
    (2) Why should I believe that we're going to get right this time?

  • One that was set on HARDWARE instead, a virtualization support at processor level?

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't both Intel and AMD has develloped something (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderpool) that will make it possible to run unmodified guest OSes under the same supervisor? If so, why bother with a common interface to the Linux Kernel, if this interface won't be necessary?

    It would be much better if they focused on supporting each other VM image format, so one could migrate a live Xen Domain to a VMWare server and vice-versa.

  • Personal opinions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kscguru (551278) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @10:49AM (#15825256)
    Disclaimer: VMware employee, personal opinion.

    VMware went to OLS and presented a paper demonstrating a VMI interface that runs either Xen or VMware at the same speed as the Xen interface. Xen has never tried to run on a VMware hypervisor, but XenSource went and signed a deal to run on the (future) Windows hypervisor. My opinion is that Xen is a bunch of hypocrites: they complain about how VMware isn't open, then go sign a deal with the least open company of all. Of course, I'm biased.

    Xen wants VMware to adopt the Xen hypervisor interface. This is impossible. The Xen interface is too tightly coupled to the Xen hypervisor; it's missing pieces that are necessary to run the VMware hypervisor at reasonable performance. VMware doesn't really care which interface actually proliferates (as in, there will be a layer of interface glue regardless), so long as the interface is good enough. Xen's interface is not good enough. As of two weeks ago, Xen and VMI were the only two interfaces out there.

    Greg K-H's gripe with VMware is that the kernel module isn't open source. Yes and no (I don't want to argue - the code is open but not GPLed), the point is that he's spending more time complaining about Xen and VMware than it would take to actually mediate the problem. (Which, thankfully, someone else is doing instead, with paravirt_ops).

    Finally: I saw more pot-shots about being unable to benchmark VMware in the original article. That changed several months ago, benchmarks are now allowed by EULA. Certain companies ought to stop spreading FUD...

    • Re:Personal opinions (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anthony Liguori (820979) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @12:01PM (#15825800) Homepage
      Disclaimer: VMware employee, personal opinion.

      Disclaimer: Xen hacker, personal opinion :-) Didn't think it was necessary to mention but what the heck :-)

      VMware went to OLS and presented a paper demonstrating a VMI interface that runs either Xen or VMware at the same speed as the Xen interface.

      I missed OLS unfortunately but I've come to the conclusion that VMI is not the best interface for Xen long term. I should say that I was advocating VMI for a long time previously so this isn't just a knee-jerk reaction.

      The problem with VMI is that it hides the hypervisor interface from the guest. Now, if you're VMware, this is ideal. If you're a Free Software project, and your interfaces are evolving overtime, having your interfaces hidden means that there's no pressure to improve them.

      The biggest benefit for upstream merge for Xen will be a ton of hackers on LKML auditing the interfaces and saying where they suck and forcing us to change them. You don't want to hide the virtual timer interface behind PIT emulation. You want codesign.

      This doesn't mean that Linux shouldn't support VMI. It just means that not all projects should standardize on the VMI ABI.

      Xen has never tried to run on a VMware hypervisor, but XenSource went and signed a deal to run on the (future) Windows hypervisor. My opinion is that Xen is a bunch of hypocrites: they complain about how VMware isn't open, then go sign a deal with the least open company of all. Of course, I'm biased.

      Please try to separate XenSource from the Xen community. Many of us don't work for XenSource and many of us think that XenSource does stupid things (this being a good example).

      Xen wants VMware to adopt the Xen hypervisor interface.

      Many of us don't even want Xen to use its own interface. Why would we wish it upon VMware :-) The problem with a VC-funded company associated with Xen is that some brand new executive makes some silly statement and it's treated as the official opinion of the Xen community.

      Imagine if every exec at every company loosely associated with Linux was quoted as gospel for Linux's future.

      This is impossible. The Xen interface is too tightly coupled to the Xen hypervisor; it's missing pieces that are necessary to run the VMware hypervisor at reasonable performance. VMware doesn't really care which interface actually proliferates (as in, there will be a layer of interface glue regardless), so long as the interface is good enough. Xen's interface is not good enough. As of two weeks ago, Xen and VMI were the only two interfaces out there.

      This is absolutely correct. The Xen interface is not rich enough to support a variety of hypervisors with reasonable performance. Anyone who claims differently is lying to you :-)

      Greg K-H's gripe with VMware is that the kernel module isn't open source. Yes and no (I don't want to argue - the code is open but not GPLed), the point is that he's spending more time complaining about Xen and VMware than it would take to actually mediate the problem.

      Which is a valid gripe. VMware is going to get the short-end of the stick when interacting with the kernel community because they are doing something that is viewed both as immoral and illegal. There's an easy way to fix that...

      Honestly, if there was a single Free hypervisor that worked with VMI (and L4 doesn't count ;-)), VMI would already be in the kernel.

      (Which, thankfully, someone else is doing instead, with paravirt_ops).

      Yes, and this is going to be a very long process. I will say too that engineers from Xen and VMware have both been working together surprisingly well on this. There is an active conversation going on in the osdl-virtualization list and on other channels. Despite these stories, Xen and VMware are actually working together.

      Finally: I saw more pot-shots about being unable to benc

      • Re:Personal opinions (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kscguru (551278) on Tuesday August 01 2006, @11:09PM (#15829470)
        See, this is why I still read Slashdot. Informed opinions from interesting people! Thanks for stopping by to chat.

        Please try to separate XenSource from the Xen community. Many of us don't work for XenSource and many of us think that XenSource does stupid things (this being a good example).

        Fair - and in hindsight, I should have noted that distinction, apologies. (That particular MS/XenSource alliance happens to be at the top of my stupid list ... it hurts Xen, XenSource, all other virtualization businesses (via FUD), and ultimately helps only Microsoft).

        I actually don't like VMI either. I still believe the hypervisor should be hidden - if the OS wants a virtualized timer, it should use a paravirtualized device driver, the API for which is independent of the hypervisor's core interface - but I don't think that loading a ROM is the way to load an interface. It's re-inventing BIOS. Frankly, I don't think there is a good solution. And once the CPU vendors get their acts together and actually virtualize the MMU (yup, they virtualized the CPU but not the onboard MMU, VT/Pacifica v1 is as weak as a 286) then the pressure on paravirtualization decreases as the performance advantage disappears. (Device paravirtualization is still needed - but that's easy! And the ground is ripe for competition in the feature set of an emulated device.)

        • Disclaimer: In addition to being opinionated, I've used Xen and VMware in an attempt to deploy an ISP hosting environment.

          Actually, the guest OS can very much benefit from being cooperatively virtualized.

          A lot of realtime code is run along side the kernel under a rudimentary hypervisor (Google for nanokernels, Adeos [gna.org] and RTLinux [tldp.org] do this sort of thing). In this very important case, it is usually quite a pain to require the OS to have to implement the infrastructure to support emulated devices when it could

    • If you had bothered to RTA, you'd have seen that, evidently:

      Oracle is a significant player in the open-source community and, as both an open-source and commercial database provider, has a very strong interest in getting virtualization technology into the kernel.

      The article also mentions the Oracle Cluster File System technology (Open Source), as well as Oracle's recent acquisition of open-source database company Sleepycat and its Berkeley DB product earlier this year.

      This may explain why I got a call rec

    • Then YOU don't use them...I understand your feelings about open-source, but how does that statement get modded interesting?

      Your type of attitude is just as stifling as proprietary offerings..."If your not open, then you are evil and must be destroyed. I'm taking my source and going home"

      I'll play a risky card here. I see the value of open source and support it, but that doesn't mean it has to be the only game in town. Same thing with democracy. It is a superior gov't. However, does that mean we sho

      • Re:Right tool... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bogado (25959) <<ten.odagob> <ta> <odagob>> on Tuesday August 01 2006, @09:29AM (#15824732) Homepage Journal

        Your type of attitude is just as stifling as proprietary offerings..."If your not open, then you are evil and must be destroyed. I'm taking my source and going home"


        I don't think that is the position of the granparent. I believe it is more on the line of "If you aren't open, then don't pretend to be open. Opening up the minimum of resources, just to appear in the headlines is not fooling anyone".

        I don't like this atitude of labeling stuff as evil and good. This tends to misrepresent almost everithing, google is good, sure what about all those secrets and the censorship in china (I actualy don't think that this is google's fault but many people think it is). MS is evil to root, but many people use their software and like it (it's not for me, but who am I to say what's best for everyone?). And so it goes, up to the infamous Bush's "axis of evil" that aparently if you classify to this group then it's okay if you are arrested and sent to Cuba to be tortured.

        Come on people there are shades of gray, and even shades of yellow, green, blue and other colors. There are many sides, many ways to see the same fact, and many time what seems pure black from one of those sides can be clear as whater in other point of view.
    • I'm loosing patience with propriatary software vendors who embrace doing the minimal amount of free software necissary to hold back free alternatives. They're getting washed over, and they deserve every bit of it.
    • Yeah, what teh_crizzle said. Xen is harder to set up, but also doable without wrecking your install. The thing about Xen is, it works by modifying the kernel, so any linux installation media needs a modified kernel to install into Xen. But Xen is faster on any processor that doesn't have built in virtualization. On the other hand, VMWare is much easier to use, so if you want to use virtualization for playing around with new distros, VMware is your best bet.

    • No, it's pretty easy. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kadin2048 (468275) <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Tuesday August 01 2006, @10:09AM (#15824966) Homepage Journal
      No, it does not.

      I've set up VMWare Server (which is FAIB) on my Kubuntu Dapper system and it was quite easy. Basically you just follow the instructions, I didn't run into any major installation gotchas. You register with VMWare and they email you a serial number and a link to the download site; you run the installer and choose where you want things to be installed (I use /var/vmware/) and you're pretty much off. It took me longer and was more of a PITA to install Windows on the resulting VM than it was to install VMWare itself.

      Only thing I ran into though: be careful of the networking option that you choose. The default is 'Bridged,' which creates a virtual interface using your machine's same network card, which then gets a DHCP address from your LAN router. This is nice because it means your virtual machine doesn't use the same IP as your host machine's native OS. This caused me some problems with services that I had running on the host, netatalk in particular. (The default configuration of netatalk is to try to automatically find the correct network interface, and it got confused by the virtual one apparently; explicitly defining which one to use solved the problem.)

      Long story short: consider using the 'NAT' networking option until you know what you're doing; this does IP masquerading so that the VM uses your machine's regular network interface and IP address. It means there's an extra layer of NAT to punch through if you wanted to run services on the VM, but it keeps most of the complexity hidden inside VMWare.

      After you get VMWare installed, you can either create a bare virtual hard disk and install whichever x86 OS you want, or you can download pre-configured virtual machines; I don't know if Edgy is one of these, but it might be.

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