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SuSE Businesses Linux Business Novell

Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse 167

Posted by Hemos from the virtual-shipping dept.
daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."
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Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse More

Novell To Ship Xen in Next Version of Suse

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  • Why? (Score:1)

    by eddy ( 18759 )

    Simple question. ("normal users").

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:48AM (#11909887)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)

      by dtfinch ( 661405 ) *
      You take 10 machines. Install 10 copies of Linux or NetBSD on each, using Xen to run them simultaneously. Then you make 10 beowulf clusters out of it.
    • Dude, your interrogative reeks of the ecological fallacy [wikipedia.org]
      Frag deine frage.

    • Re:Why? (Score:1, Funny)

      by eddy ( 18759 )

      Alright, I should just have RTFA:

      Novell is adding the technology, which is useful for a number of tasks, to give programmers new abilities [...]

      Ahh... yes... It's all so very clear to me now.

      Looking forward to be able to do a number of useful tasks and wield new abilities.

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      Lets you try out new distros or OS with ease.
      Allows you to partition a computer into many virtual machines.
      Want to give 10 people there own servers to play with? Just use Xen. Great for ISPs.

      The real question is what do you mean by a "normal" user. Just because you do not have a use for it and you might not does not mean that many people will. I have no use for AIM but I know some people seem to.

    • Why?

      Zen... [novell.com] Xen... [zdnet.com.au] Zen... [novell.com] Xen... [zdnet.com.au] Zen... [novell.com] Xen [zdnet.com.au]...

      Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"


      • NOVELL SUPPORT: "Thank you for calling Novell Support. How may I be of assistance to you today?"

        CUSTOMER: "Uh, my syslogs are telling me that I've got a problem with something called [insert hard sibilant here]-en".

        NOVELL SUPPORT: "Sir, is that [insert hard sibilant here]-en with an 'X' or [insert hard sibilant here]-en with a 'Z'?"

        CUSTOMER: "Huh?"

    • Simple question. ("normal users").

      They're talking about Suse Pro, which I would assume is more for corporate desktops. Normal users are the demographic for Suse Personal, which might not include Xen. If Suse Personal does include Xen, it's probably because they already integrated it with Pro, so they get it for "free."

      • Is there such a thing as Suse Personal anymore? I thought they did away with it and now all you can get is a Live CD (a la Knoppix I presume) if you want to see what SUSE is all about. SUSE's website [novell.com] doesn't mention a Personal Edition for 9.2 which has been released for many months now.
        • I thought had un-cancelled it (guess they only did that for 9.1). But I would imagine that the target demographic for Pro didn't change when they stopped producing a Personal edition.
        • Suse does not provide a personal edition, they do still provide a free edition. You can of course perform an FTP install, fairly painless, or you can download the DVD ISO [suse.com] of SUSE 9.2.

          The press release indicated a free version of 9.3 to follow about 8 weeks after the release.
    • Virtual Private Server hosting providers could use this. I believe most of them are using User Mode Linux. Mine [rimuhosting.com] is. That would benefit those of us who need that level of hosting.

  • What about UML? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 )
    How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux? They appear to scratch a similar itch, but has anyone tried out both to compare?

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chirs ( 87576 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:06AM (#11910074)
      Xen can be significantly faster due to the difference in how it works.

      UML is a port of the kernel to a "POSIX architecture" so that it runs in userspace.

      Xen is a port of the kernel to a quasi-x86 architecture (basically x86 with some non-virtualizable instructions removed). This means that most of the time Xen is running directly on the hardware.
    • Xen outperforms [cam.ac.uk] UML. At least on applications that heavily work the OS.

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by vertigo ( 341 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:19AM (#11910202) Homepage
      I have. I have a single computer acting as my local home server (a p3-500 with 512mb ram). This machine acts as a linux desktop, development machine, it handles my mail and web stuff, and it acts as a shells-server sandbox for a friend who uses it to test his code on. Some of these things are mutually exclusive (I like to run debian stable for mail+web, while my development stuff is bleeding edge). Also, it is handy for said friend to have root access in order to be able to install needed packages. With a VM he can have a sandbox to freely play around in without having it affect my system in any way.

      As a result, i have a base system for my desktop (currently running Ubuntu Hoary), and on top of that are 3 VM's: one for mail, one for web, one for shells. The filesystems are stored in containerfiles, so they are very easy to backup. Until a couple of months ago I used User Mode Linux for these VM's, but UML development doesn't seem to progress very much and performance wasn't optimal, to say the least. Because of this, I switched to Xen and I've been very happy with the results. Setting is very easy. Compared to UML, Xen is _much_ faster. I haven't noticed any overhead from Xen, both the host system and the individual VM's seem to operate at native or near native speed, while UML (even with skas etc) took a very noticable performance hit. Development seems very active, tracking the newest kernels. Also, the management tools are really nice. Setup of the network was much easier for me than with UML, every VM automatically creates ports for the console, and there's is additional web management that makes managing the VM's really friendly. All in all, if you have any interest in playing with this stuff, I would very much recommend Xen.

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:26AM (#11910292)
      How does Xen compare to User Mode Linux?

      Xen is going to be a much better performer than UML. However, if you need maximum performance and are OK with running only one operating system (Linux), consider Linux VServer [linux-vserver.org]. It gives you most of the functionality of "virtualization" (even though it's not true virtualization since there is only _one_ kernel running on the machine) - a complete "virtual server" appearance with essentially no overhead.

      There are numerous advantages to the VServer approach (a.k.a. as Zones on Solaris and Jails on FreeBSD, BTW), such as the ability to access the filesystem from host (very useful for backups), ability to view/control the virtual server processes from host, single VM and IO across all virtual servers thus providing much better optimization. The performance is stunning - you just don't feel "virtualized".

      Linux VServer isn't backed by major universities and Microsoft Research [cam.ac.uk] and thus unfortunately does not get the publicity, even though it is one of the most revolutionary projects out there IMHO. I hope it becomes part of vanilla kernel some time soon.

      • How does the security in VServer fair against Xen?

        I did a little research on this a long time ago and I looked at both VServer and UML, but neither seemed like they would be secure against a root level breach in one of the VM's (therefore compromising all the other VM's). I just did a quick look though, so maybe I was wrong.

        I have not looked at Xen. I did not know it existed until today.

        I have been using VMware and although it runs Windows great, running Linux in VMware doesn't seem to run as fast.
        • How does the security in VServer fair against Xen?

          This is a question that has no answer. It depends on what your access to the machine is and what you consider a breach. I.e. if you are a user on a guest OS, then neither Xen nor VServer do anything to make it more diffcult to become root on the guest OS.

          From within a (typical) VServer, it is pretty difficult to escalate your capabilities. More difficult than gaining root from a typical Linux shell. The main mechanism at work (Posix cabailities with min

          • But I guess the main point is that asking "Is Xen more secure than VServer than UML" is like asking "Which taste better - apples or oranges?" (i.e. what's your definition of taste?).

            No way. That's a cop-out.

            I think the question at hand is whether or not a compromise in one of the guest VM's will compromise the entire machine.

            And yes, there are better designs than others for preventing this. If someone roots one of the guest machines, I don't want it to compromise anything other than that one VM.
            • Disclaimer: I run linux-vserver, and I have not used UML, only looked at it.

              linux-vserver is pretty well hardened against a malicious root user in a guest from doing anything at all to the host, or other guests. Especially if you use grsecurity on it as well. You can't get out via the normal methods, and no /dev/mem exists, and you can disallow the guest from creating a /dev/mem.

              With UML, a malicious root user in a guest can, if they know what they're doing, use that to get access to the user account in t

    • Re:What about UML? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Alioth ( 221270 )
      See one of my recent journal entries.

      For my uses for my Internet server, Xen has proven an _order of magnitude_ better performing than UML, although there were some other changes that helped (going from file-backed filesystems to partitions for each Xen domain). But even without that, in practise, in most every day loads, the performance overhead of Xen compared to native is only around 2%, where the overhead of UML+skas3 is greater than 50%.

      The Xen website has a performance comparison which has been inde

  • Good Idea! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by elemur ( 7613 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:50AM (#11909904)
    The virtualization software makes it much easier to build task-focused servers, helping add more security to your environment... with very low overhead.

    Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides? The Solaris setup is really very easy.. you can have a custom environment booted and running in a few minutes..

    I will say that Xen is impressive, given its benchmarks posted.. it shows a very efficient virtualization engine.
    • Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?

      Solaris Zones and XEN are different products entirely. XEN is a low-level hardware monitor that is loaded before any O/S, and then provides a virtual machine for the actual O/S. XEN boots one or more slightly modified Linux kernels (or NetBSD, I seem to recall; with support for the "XEN Platform" which happens to be binary compatible with x86). These kernels are completely separated from each other, they do not

    • Re:Good Idea! (Score:3, Informative)

      by nathanh ( 1214 )

      Has anybody done a 1-to-1 comparison between Solaris Zones and the features that Xen provides?

      They're completely different technologies. Short summary: Xen is para-virtualisation, Zones are a kernel abstraction.

      With Solaris zones there is a single kernel. The process structure has been extended with a zone ID, so the kernel knows which zone each process belongs to. Solaris boots normally and becomes the master. Then each slave zone boots inside the master. Zone filesystems are simply subdirectories

  • Without Windows, not too helpful... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by datastalker ( 775227 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:51AM (#11909918) Homepage
    Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program, but without being able to use Windows with it, I'm gonna have to stick with VMware.

    I can see the uses for it, but right now, those don't align with what I need, and I suspect that will hold true for many others as well.

    Even still, it's cool technology.

    • I almost wonder if this isn't so much an effort to compete with VMware or Wine or whatever, but rather an effort to compete with Sun's N1 Grid computing. Sun boasts a lot about running different apps in different containers, etc., which is something Jonathan Schwartz likes to claim Linux can't do. It appears that now SuSE (and soon Fedora) *can* do that out of the box.

      • Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's complimentary to this. In terms of Grid computing the ability to run jobs in sandboxed containers that exist only for the life of the job and may be a bespoke version of an OS (different OS, different libraries, etc., etc) is exactly what is needed. Lots of work is going on in this area, and VMWare, User Mode Linux, and Solaris containers are all tools which allow this to be implemented.

        Of course you could argue that you could just run Solaris x86 and then use containers to host an instance of another

    • Re:Without Windows, not too helpful... (Score:5, Informative)

      by rca66 ( 818002 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:59AM (#11910000)
      Of course, I understand the licensing and freedom restrictions about using Windows under such a program,

      It has only technical reasons, that windows is not supported. From the Xen FAQ ( http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq .html#a1.4 [cam.ac.uk]):

      Unfortunately we do not currently support Windows; the paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However recently announced hardware support from Intel and AMD will allow us to transparently support Windows XP & 2003 Server in the near future. We are working on this and intend to have support available by the time the new processors are available.

    • You could always give qemu a try...

      http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

      A very nice, reasonably fast, and open-source x86 emulator.

      Runs Win98 nicely.

      They have just released a kernel module (on a free-as-in-beer basis) which speeds up the emulation to 50% native (works with Win2k but not Win98 yet).

    • RTFM (Score:2, Informative)

      by slobber ( 685169 )
      1.4 Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?

      Unfortunately we do not currently support Windows; the paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However recently announced hardware support from Intel and AMD will allow us to transparently support Windows XP & 2003 Server in the near future. We are working on this and intend to have support available by the time the new processors are available.

  • LOL? I want WOL. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @10:57AM (#11909986) Homepage Journal
    Linux-on-Linux (or, for that matter, Unix-on-Linux) is interesting in its own right (think shared hosting), but I want Windows-on-Linux for the occasional Windows app, as well as to just play around.

    It is interesting to see that Microsoft earlier supported Xen, but then later pulled support. Their (Xen's) homepage still mentions having received support from Microsoft Research.

    --
    Does MSN censor search results? [buffalo.edu]

    • Re:LOL? I want WOL. (Score:2, Informative)

      by stevey ( 64018 )

      Windows on Linux is here already thanks to Qemu [bellard.free.fr].

      I wrote a simple guide to Running Windows inside Debian [debian-adm...ration.org] a while back which seems fairly popular.

      The big difference with Zen is that it requires the operating systems it runs to be modified, whereas Qemu will run any native operating system, Linux, Windows, *BSD, Knoppix, etc without change.

      That to me makes it more useful.

    • This isn't LOL (Score:3, Informative)

      by barrkel ( 806779 )
      This is multiple Linuxes running on a VMM: Virtual Machine Monitor. The Linuxes run side by side, none run inside each other.

      The technique takes advantage of the multiple rings (0-3) on Intel. Normally Linux (and other kernels) run on ring 0, but with Xen the Xen VMM runs on ring 0 while Linux and other guest OSs run on ring 1, while user-mode programs continue to run on ring 3.
      • The Linuxes run side by side, none run inside each other.

        That's not exactly true. Only one instance of Linux has to directly drive all the physical hardware, with the rest sharing those resources. So, it would be more accurate to call it Linux on Linux.
  • How is this different from projects such as Linux-VServer? http://linux-vserver.org/ [linux-vserver.org]

    • Re:How's this different? (Score:4, Funny)

      by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:02AM (#11910037) Homepage
      It starts with an X, which makes it inherently cooler.
  • How does Opensource software Xen measure up to other virtualization software like VMWare and others I even do not know? Are there more anyway?

    • Re:benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chirs ( 87576 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:09AM (#11910099)
      It's faster, but with current hardware it needs support from the guest OS. You basically need to build the guest kernel to run within Xen.

      This is fairly straightforward for open-source OS's, but is why you can't currently run windows on top of Xen.

  • From TFA... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 )
    SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 also adds the Linphone software for voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); the Firefox Web browser; and the F-Spot photo organizer software. And it comes with the latest versions of graphical interface software, Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4.

    They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

    • Re:From TFA... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Wudbaer ( 48473 )
      As SuSE 9.3 is planned to be released around middle of April and KDE 3.4 is due next week IIRC and KDE usually meets its planned release dates quite accurately for such a large project I assume it will have KDE 3.4 final. SuSE usually supplies RPMs of new KDE versions (sometimes even betas and RCs) for the last 2-3 versions of their distro inside 2-3 days after release, sometimes even on the same day.

      I wish they would do the same for Gnome.

      • Re:From TFA... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rydia ( 556444 )
        They do that because SuSE has a load of people on staff that work on KDE. Not so with gnome.

        Which has, much to my chagrin, made KDE the preferred SuSE desktop, making us SuSE gnome users feel a little shunted-off.
      • I wish they would do the same for Gnome.

        I believe this [suse.com] is what you might be looking for. Also, since Novell acquired Ximian I would think that they would be focusing a lot more now on Gnome instead of just KDE. Isn't that what they use on the Novell Desktop?

    • They're planning on shipping KDE 3.4 when it's released, or they're including the current RC?

      KDE 3.4 is scheduled for March 16th and AFAIK the packages are basically done. So I guess they won't have problems shipping KDE 3.4 final mid-April, especially since they surely have used the Betas and RCs in their distribution betas...

  • Licensing Cost (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dduardo ( 592868 ) on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:03AM (#11910050)
    Does this mean you have to pay extra for each instance of suse you run under Xen?

  • Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by northcat ( 827059 )
    A distro added a package. Why is this being reported on slashdot?

    • To piss off people like you (Score:5, Funny)

      by A nonymous Coward ( 7548 ) * on Friday March 11, 2005 @11:44AM (#11910503)
      See, there's a vast uber-wing conspiracy among the internautti to waste the time of hard working productive people like yourself, who have so little time during the day for keeping up to date that they don't have time to read headlines, only stories, and thus when you read the story directly and find you have wasted your time, and then post on slashdot to complain about it, the internautti cackle with glee at another success story.

      The answer, of course, is to read the headlines first, not read the stories just because they are available, and not play the internautti's game. Eventually, if such a radical notion spreads far and wide, or even short and narrow, the internautti will be disillusioned and find some other amusement.

    • Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)

      by subgrappler ( 864963 )
      lots of distros are adding support for xen or at least have plans to. Xen support is supposed to be merged into the kernel in the near future as well. Also, big boys like IBM are starting to show lots of interest in Xen... my point is it's a significant trend where as a few months ago most people were still saying "wtf is xen? those aliens from HL2?"
  • A good use for this sort of thing is letting normal users onto a pc without making a mess of it, think:

    "Xen and the art of computer maintanance"

    • Re:The Easy Wipe OS! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mike260 ( 224212 )
      This is mentioned on their roadmap. On 3.0, you'll be able to fork a VM, let a luser loose on it, and then just throw it away along with all the crap they've managed to infect it with.
  • I fully understand a usefulness of linux on linux, as well as other virtualizations.

    That said, when can I get WINE or something similar working sufficiently so the few things that keep me having a windows box around can fade away? I'm not even talking games - I really just need audiblemanager and itunes running. Neither of these should be hard at all.

    I'm almost tempted to buy a mac mini just so I can get this functionality without the windows factor.
    • iTunes already works in Wine. There has been some significant development to get it working more smoothly lately, especially in Crossover Office, but also in the vanilla Wine tree. No idea about the other app you mentioned, I've never heard of it, but it's probably worth giving it a whirl in Wine.
    • To summarize your comment:
      "So project X is doing fine, but why can't project Y do what I want it to?"

      For someone who's .sig describes himself as a 'free software enthusiast', you sure don't seem to understand how the free software world works.

      Ever heard of 'Scratching an itch', etc?
  • I fully understand the reasons why Xen doesn't run Windows as a guest operating system, but I still find it a damn shame. It could be the perfect open source replacement for VMWare, and it would make a hell of a lubricator for Windows-to-Linux migration projects.
  • as several features, notably any APM or ACPI power management at all, don't work with Xen at the moment.
  • ...to running Linux in something like VMWare ESX (not GSX!)?
    • > ...to running Linux in something like VMware ESX (not GSX!)?

      Not GSX... How is VMWare ESX different from GSX?
      They don't let you screw around with the OS underneath the ESX version; otherwise it's no different from the GSX on Linux.
      Last time I tried ESX I could get to Linux logon prompt with ALT+F2.
      With the level of performance they provide VMware won't be around for too long...

      (The answer to your question can be found on Google - "xen vmware comparison".)
    • Xen is like ESX but faster and with less easy to use management tools.
      • From what I can tell it doesn't have the cool features like VMotion where you can move a VM to another physical host without shutting it down first. From what I can see the only real areas it is likely to be compelling are price, license, and performance.
  • from Gordon Freeman himself!

    Well, staying true to his silent methods Mr. Freeman had nothing to say, but instead grabbed his trusty crowbar and walked out the door, without so much as saying "Goodbye".

    Our reporter, however, believes that this, a second, or possibly third attempt by Xen to invade the Earth will be stopped cold in its tracks!

  • Few days ago was announced [zdnet.co.uk] with fireworks that SuSE 9.3 will include Beagle [gnome.org], but at the very least that was not explicited in this latest round of press releases.

    Was it removed or was considered not as important as the other announced features?

  • when will people start pronouncing SuSE correctly in the workplace?

    I'm sure I'll hear Xen called "X-men" at some point.

  • ...letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously.

    I can see the problem with this right away - if anybody uses this their license fees will go through the roof!

  • The poor-mans approach ... which works perfectly well, if a little slowly ... is to make CDs which do this sort of thing http://home.btconnect.com/chrisandcarolyn/suse-fo r -windows.png [btconnect.com]

    Torrents here http://home.btconnect.com/chrisandcarolyn/torrents / [btconnect.com]

    In the spirit of UK National Science Week, this one works nicely http://home.btconnect.com/chrisandcarolyn/knosci.p ng [btconnect.com]

    They all 'autorun'. Most of them 'boot', too. Have fun !

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