Rumor has it that Linux and virtualization provider Levanta, whose recent release of Levanta 6.0 earned it a SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Product of the Year award, may have gone belly up.

At Levanta’s offices, no one is answering the phones, and a press release has yet to be issued; but on the Mikes Thoughts blog former Levanta Senior Director of Services Michael Perry said that the writing is on the wall. He shared a teary-eyed reminiscence of his time at the 9-year old Linux venture:

Levanta is gone dear reader. I will miss it and what it might have been; but I’ll never miss a whole subset of the cast of characters who thought they were above the laws of space and time. No you were not as it turns out. You made the failure as much as if you drove the car. You simply cannot run the company like its your personal kingdom. Sorry. So, it will be gone and people will wonder whether it was good or bad.

This came as a shock to outspoken user and Levanta advocate Arty Ecock, manager of VM enterprise systems at the City University of New York (CUNY), Computing and Information Systems (CIS). “If the news is true, then it will be a great loss to our organization,” Ecock said, adding that Levanta’s product was “a perfect fit” for his organization and that they were just months away from making a new Intrepid X purchase. “We were very big fans.”

According to Ecock, the Levanta product was superior; if anyone is to blame, it is an inferior sales and marketing team. “They had a winning product but they didn’t know how to market it.” Ecock added that the sales team was “garbage.” As one of the first open source commercial startups, Levanta always faced an uphill battle. There was virtually no market for enterprise Linux when Levanta started. But after companies discovered Linux, several players moved in, and apparently Levanta couldn’t get its act together. “There’s nothing that I know of on the market that will easily replace what we have. Now we’ll have to go back to square one,” Ecock said.

But Levanta users may not have to worry. If some analysts are correct, the company may be in the process of being acquired. Should this be the case, users like Ecock would expect Levanta to rise from the ashes and dominate the market under the direction of a better marketing strategy.

So is Levanta really dead, or is it in the process of being bought? If you have information on the company’s status, please let us know. But it appears that this is no belated April Fool’s joke.

Many IT shops have strict policies prohibiting the storage of multimedia content on shared systems. Issues over copyrighted content and inappropriate material pose many problems. However, more business products offer various content in audio or video media. These can be training videos, quality assurance audio recordings, company commercials for employee viewing, bandwidth abuse or even music for lobby purposes.  Several options for a streaming multimedia server are available in Enterprise Linux environments.

Streaming multimedia storage

Some of these options include icecast, gnump3d, jinzora and shoutcast. I had an opportunity to configure GNUMP3d on my CentOS linux system and found it quite a good solution. For GNUP3d, the install was obtaining a tar file and a simple extraction, then running the following command:

make install

The GNUMP3d server configuration file is located at /gnump3d-3.0/etc/gnump3d.conf in the path where you extracted your tar file. Reading through this file is fairly intuitive and you can point your media path, some basic performance options, host server configuration, and security settings. Once it is saved and index operation is performed and the service started as /gnump3d-3.0/bin/gnump3d2 to start the service. From there, a website is up and running with your indexed media.

Some further customization of the interface to brand it to your Intranet would be a good idea as it is fairly basic and looks like free software. The various packages offer different levels of functionality and levels of the look and feel. GNUMP3d gets a star because it can be configured and running in a matter of five minutes.

Client streaming strategy

Virtual Linux environments can host these systems, especially if there is any concern about the bandwidth required if rolling this solution into existing Linux systems. Some bandwidth throttling and front-side firewalling may also be a good idea to ensure the intended audiences — even internally — are able to access this content for all configurations. For example, if you have many remote sites on limited bandwidth, the streaming media would not be appropriate.

A few weeks ago, Oracle unveiled its new virtual machine (VM) product, Oracle VM, based on the Xen hypervisor. But why is Oracle introducing its own VM when it already has the Xen VM that comes with the Red Hat code? For an answer, we turn to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Don Rosenberg, who fills us in on what Oracle VM means for users, the competition and for Linux in the enterprise.

Oracle VM
Red Hat ships the Xen VM with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), with the same Red Hat source code that Oracle uses to build its Unbreakable Linux operating system.

But Oracle chose to go directly to Xen.org to download the source code for its own Oracle VM. While Red Hat runs Xen from within an operating system, Oracle runs its VM on a server. From here the Oracle VM deploys agents or images to computers without an operating system on them, creating virtual servers.

Oracle describes its VM as a console for the management of Xen, complete with a built-in operating system, making it a software appliance. The appliance has paravirtualized drivers for RHEL 4 and 5 but currently runs Windows without paravirtualization, resulting in sluggish Windows performance. Oracle claims its VM is three times more efficient than the leading VM (presumably VMware), but this comparison does not refer to speed so much as to the use of resources on a box. On a box that needs an OS and VMware installed, running via VMware would take up roughly three times the resources; Oracle’s software appliance saves space.

Oracle’s virtualization strategy
The Oracle VM is free to download and use; those wanting support will have to sign up for a paid plan. But Oracle says that its virtualization solution is still cheaper than Red Hat’s. RHEL supports some virtualization (at no extra cost), but full-blown implementation requires an additional product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform.

The Red Hat solution calls for Red Hat-certified products from third parties, but an Oracle VM will run only Oracle databases, middleware and applications. By releasing its own VM, Oracle avoids third-party complications (such as software dependencies and support finger-pointing) and third-party payments. It also ends up controlling the software stack from top to bottom, including virtualization.

One can presumably find Oracle VM customers among the 1,500 that Oracle says already pay for Unbreakable Linux support (Dell, Stanford University, McKesson and Mitsubishi, among others). The unknown number of customers already running Oracle on VMware now have to decide whether to accept Oracle support (along with the Oracle VM) or continue to run on the competitor’s product with support from Oracle. Oracle customers who already run on Xen will find the switch to Oracle VM easier, of course.

Oracle says it has 9,000 developers at work on its software products, including Linux, and points out that Red Hat’s total employees amount to only 2,000. Oracle needs all its software skills to track Red Hat as closely as possible. Red Hat is upping the ante by announcing that in 2008 it will offer software vendors the Red Hat Appliance Operating System. Applications can be written to this layer to produce a software appliance that will run on any Red Hat system, physical or virtual, no matter where it is located.

Linux has accelerated virtualization
The Age of Virtualization is upon us, and I don’t believe we would have gotten this far this fast without open source software. Virtualization and VMware originated on mainframes, and when IBM finally “got it,” it used Linux to revive a company that was sinking slowly into the past. By adopting Linux, it came up with an OS that could be used on all of its hardware. And by applying its mainframe know-how, it came up with such marvels as the mainframe that could configure itself to be multiple-server instances by day, then turn back into a mainframe at night (for order taking and order batch-processing, respectively) or any combination of mainframe and servers). Moving client/server over to mainframe virtualization eventually gave way to cloud computing. Combined with grid computing, servers and applications are now thought of as “somewhere out there” in a virtual space. Because IBM made these improvements to Linux, the code was fed back into the Linux kernel, which was meanwhile being improved from the other direction (such as hundreds of servers being linked to form a mainframe). The invisible hand of the free market supplied a wealth of code that could be freely downloaded and reworked for anyone’s use.

All this happened in a world in which the dominant computer systems in businesses were desktops that eventually (with the help of open source BSD code) managed to form networks. They used one type of processor design (Intel) and one brand of operating system (Windows). VMware caught the eye of open source developers not only because it allowed network technicians to design, build and test networks while using only a single box, but because it took on the problem of how to use both Linux and Windows on a single box without rebooting.

This achievement rattled the windows in the Wintel offices. A few years earlier, Netscape boasted prematurely about its plans to build a platform that would be OS-independent and died as a result. And IT departments, tired of having to do separate installs for each Windows box, admired the way Linux could be shot over the wire to an unconfigured machine. This was an early virtualization concept that looked ahead to a world we may yet enter, one where the end user’s processor and software may be something other than Wintel. Porting apps would be less necessary if they were written to a layer high enough above the operating system(s).

Long ago, IBM and Apple had a joint venture to develop such a layer. The plan was to use layers to effectively virtualize operating systems and processors. Taligent collapsed from the weight of its own ambitious plans, but we are a lot closer to its goal. Now even Microsoft is getting into virtualization, competing with Red Hat and Oracle to build virtual data centers that most effectively use resources in real time.

Now that the open source Xen project has taken on some of the functions of VMware, what will become of this proprietary product that had so much to do with the current virtualization surge? It is difficult in an expanding market to say that VMware’s sales will drop, for it is already giving away the low-end server version of their product. Because it handles many more operating systems and does more things than Xen, VMware will survive in a specialized marketplace. The question is, will Xen push down VMware prices? Or, as with the move from CentOS to RHEL, will Xen’s position at the low end of the market serve to support a high price for VMware?

In the past 24 hours, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) beta became available through Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. While RHEL has been available in limited beta for a few weeks, this public beta announcement came on the heels of Novell’s launch of SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, its latest enterprise OS offering.

Red Hat executives made the announcement of their partnership with Amazon a few weeks ago. Now users of Amazon’s Web service can participate in the testing of Red Hat’s latest enterprise-level Linux offering with AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) within the Amazon EC2 environment with email-based support for the public beta, according to the the Red Hat Online Services Team. The decision to take RHEL into the cloud is part of a larger company deployment strategy.

The launch of SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 is arguably the bigger announcement. Novell’s new SUSE is a real time operating system, which allows critical processes to take priority over processor tasks. The new release gets many of its bells and whistles (e.g. sleeping spinlocks, interrupt threads and high-resolution timers) from real-time patches developed by the Linux community.

Among Novell’s Real Time partners is Sun Microsystems, whose open source Java will benefit from the collaboration — and from competition between Novell and Red Hat. In light of Red Hat’s new strategy and the announcement that Red Hat would also be collaborating with Sun on Java, I wouldn’t be surprised if Red Hat were trying to create more Java developers on their end. What do you think? Email me or leave us a comment.

It arrived a tad later than expected, but today the Ubuntu mailing list announced that Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced “juice̶ is available for download.

Ubuntu JeOS is a variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances. As we reported back in September, with JeOS Canonical has ripped out several software packages to streamline Ubuntu for virtualization purposes. The subtractions include the open source database MySQL; the Common Unix Printing Layer, or CUPS; email; and LDAP functionality.

The upshot of this? Users will have access to a server OS that’s 215 MB in size (Ubuntu Server is roughly 700 MB). The streamlined OS means users can download virtual appliances faster and run more of them per server.

Ubuntu JeOS will be available via the VMware Technology Network and is currently offered only ISVs and OEMs. The approach is similar to another VMware partner, rPath, which packages Linux-based virtual appliances with ISV-specified applications using its rBuilder, technology.

Another way to get Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 is to point your browser to:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/jeos/releases/gutsy/release/

Currently JeOS is available as a 32-bit flavor only.

While VMware’s stock dropped another 6 points yesterday, losing about one-third of its trading value in the past two weeks, Oracle’s stock soared after investors rushed to buy following the database giant’s surprise virtualization announcement. Conveniently, traders ignored any analysis of the unpatched zero-day vulnerability (public exploit available) that the company won’t patch until Jan. 15 (link courtesy of a tip at Slashdot).

Lucky Larry, no?

And that’s just the stock news. On the tech side, Oracle’s announcement signals clearly that the future of the operating system as we know it today is again in flux. Truly, Oracle VM is Target: Red Hat AND Microsoft Windows.

Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc. was, as always, in front of this issue from the beginning. He was quoted heavily in our sister site’s day one coverage of Oracle VM and then mere hours later he was posting more of his expert analysis on the Illuminata Perspectives blog on how Oracle would love for the kids to start just saying no to drugs and operating systems, thank you very much.

“There’s a nasty little war afoot over the future of the operating system.” — Gordon Haff, Illuminata

That’s Haff’s lead to a blog post titled “Oracle: Just Say No to Operating Systems,” and it’s pretty spot on, IMO.

The battle has many sides, each with many players, and every one of them has officially solidified his or her strategy for the future. You have smaller players like application vendor rPath carrying a big stick with rBuilder and pre-packaged virtual appliances; then there are the operating system vendors peddling new wares like Red Hat Appliance OS (AOS), announced last week, which seeks to create a massive Red Hat-certified channel of appliances built on an “optimized RHEL” in the first half of 2008.

And let us not forget another major operating system vendor: Viridian and Microsoft’s standalone hypervisor. Due out next year, it will officially make Microsoft the last big name vendor to get a hypervisor of its own out onto the market, but … that last point is a moot one, I think, and Haff agreed in a recent post covering the MS hypervisor’s big reveal. “Microsoft has a huge footprint in data centers — and even more in the IT installations of smaller companies. Thus, however tardy and reluctant Microsoft’s arrival to virtualization may be (Virtual Server notwithstanding), its plans and presence matter.”

But back to this operating system war. Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath, has been particularly vocal about this topic during the past year, and for good reason: This former Red Hatter has built a business around mitigating the importance of the operating system in the enterprise and couldn’t wait to lace into his former employer following the AOS announcement.

“It will be interesting to see how Red Hat manages the conflict between their legacy general-purpose operating system business and the technology requirements associated with delivering JeOS to support an application vendor-maintained virtual appliance,” Marshall said in a statement sent to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.

He even blogged a Top 10 list, Letterman-style, to prove his anti-certification point even more:

Top Ten Responses to Certification Problems
10 – Re-install and call me back if you are still having problems.
9 – Can you send me a test case that reproduces that problem?
8 – It works for me.
7 – Have you been to any of our training classes yet?
6 – This is obviously not an application problem. Call the OS vendor.
5 – My shift is about to end and I am going to need to transfer you to someone else
4 – Did the sales guy talk to you about our consulting services?
3 – I’m going to need to escalate this one to engineering
2 – Your support contract doesn’t cover this type of issue
1 – Take a picture of your screen and email it to me because I have never seen anything like this

I half expected a flying pencil or Paul Shaffer to burst forth from my laptop after that last one. Perhaps the certification touted over and over again by Red Hat during our call last week is more Achilles Heel than Golden Fleece? We shall see.
Roger Burkhardt from Ingres gave some real world examples of why he thought rPath’s model would work best (hint: it’s because they built their BI appliance with rBuilder).

I’m in your camp, (Billy) … I’ve never bought a “kit car” myself and back in my CTO role at the NYSE I didn’t want my team building the software equivalent. I had 30 people just building development stacks for trading systems alone and - to your point - they started with certified components. The need to coordinate patches between various vendors sometimes led to substantial project delays. Now, at Ingres, we have addressed this with your team and our customers and partners are reporting enormous reductions in effort from our rpath and JasperSoft-based Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance. A 75% reduction in effort is at the low end of the metrics reported back and the speed improvements are even greater.

And then there’s Oracle. According to Haff, the Unbreakable Linux department, from which this Xen-based Oracle VM announcement sprung yesterday, is “based on the idea that when you buy an application from Oracle you also get some bits that let the application sit on top of the hardware and perform necessary tasks like talking to disk. Oracle has been subsuming operating system functions like memory and storage management for years; subsuming the whole operating system was just the next logical step,” he said.

And I’ll let you connect the dots from here: Oracle VM is based on Xen, which is a hypervisor, which by definition is all about subverting the role of the OS. Oracle is just taking the whole thing a step further, a step roughly the size of Larry Ellison’s private yacht, to the point where they want to reduce not only the role of the OS (with Unbreakable), but also the hypervisor. Trouble is, there’s really no data available today to support the theory that IT managers are ready to accept separate silos of hypervisors from a slew of different vendors and then one dedicated to just Oracle applications.

For now, the biggest challenge Haff saw facing Oracle is similar to that facing software appliances in general. “There’s an implicit assumption that users will be willing to have one virtualization for their boxes that run Oracle and another virtualization for everything else. That the maker of the hypervisor bits doesn’t matter,” he said.

So far, there’s scant evidence that users are willing to be quite so blase about their server virtualization. Furthermore, brand preferences aside, it remains early days for standards that handle the control and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures sourced from different vendors. — Gordon Haff

This is an announcement and a trend with long term implications. There’s nothing to see here in the short term and, just like Unbreakable Linux, once the original run of press stories and industry discussion dies down, it will stay pretty quiet. For now.

News broke this morning that Oracle is entering the virtualization space with Oracle VM. Toes were stepped on, canned analyst comments were issued via press release, and the virtualization space once again proved that it is hot, hot, hot and has no intention of settling down just yet.

According to Oracle, its new server virtualization software supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle products like Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are all certified with Oracle VM.

Consisting of open source server software and an integrated Web browser- based management console, Oracle VM provides a graphical interface for creating and managing virtual server pools, running on x86 and x86-64-based systems, across an enterprise. Oracle VM offers:

• Simplified Installation — with single install, patching and upgrading for both Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Faster Deployment — through pre-configured Virtual Machine images of Oracle Database and Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Linux and Windows Support — support for Linux and Windows guest operating systems including: Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; RHEL3, RHEL4 and RHEL5; Windows 2003, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP (on HV capable hardware)
• Single Source of Support — customers will have a single point of contact for their entire virtual environments, including the Linux operating system, and Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware and Application software

Oracle applications, middleware and database software currently certified with Oracle VM include:

– Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 and 11.1
– Oracle Application Server 10gR2 and 10gR3
– Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.4
– Oracle TimesTen 7.0.3.1
– Oracle Berkeley DB 4.6
– Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 and 12
– Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0
– PeopleTools 8.49.07 and above
– Oracle’s Siebel CRM 8
– Oracle’s Hyperion 9.3.1

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this very soon. The big questions now: Do we really need another hypervisor, and, what role will the OS play in the future, if any?

UPDATE@3:30 pm. EST: As far as specs for Oracle VM… it’s built off of Xen so the license itself is free. Oracle will only charge for support (either 2 proc for $499 or unlimited proc for $999 per instance). That’s from our man/woman on the inside, so look for confirmation later.

Yesterday, Red Hat offered a smörgåsbord to the press and the analyst community. Their main announcement: Red Hat is the greatest Linux and open source vendor on the face of the planet.

Actually, there were several announcements in yesterday’s conference call and webcast: within the typical sales and marketing noise was talk of virtualization at almost every level of the discussion, hosted by a trio of Red Hat executives.

The first of the announcements, regarding the official release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, was made by Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat’s vice president of enterprise Linux business. In some prepared remarks, Crenshaw went after proprietary virtualization technologies, saying RHEL 5.1’s virtualization delivers broader server support and up to twice the performance that the competition.

The skinny on 5.1

There were no real surprises in this announcement, especially if you’re a regular reader of SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Back in September we filed a preview article on 5.1 (RHEL 5.1 update tweaks virtualization, Windows interoperability), where we discussed the virtualizaiton updates with a few experts. Jan Stafford, our Senior Site Editor at SEL, had a 5.1 preview up as far back as May from the Red Hat Summit.

RHEL 5.0 was a success when it launched in March. The inclusion of Xen support was almost a full year behind Novell, which had baked in Xen paravirtualization back in June 2006, but it worked as advertised, albeit with a few tweaks here and there. “It’s not half-baked,” Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff told me at the time, “but it certainly doesn’t have the fit and finish we see with VMware.” Not many things do these days, as VMware loves to point out during their quarterly “ESX Server prints money!!!” press conferences. With 5.1 officially avaialble to Red Hat customers via the Red Hat Network, however, the consensus was that the gap got a little smaller.

Also back in September, Jim Klein, director of information services and technology at the Saugus Union School District in Saugus, Calif., told me that RHEL 5.1 is a “significant improvement over version 5 on the management side of things.”

In this regard, the Windows functionality in 5.1 is critical: IT managers are making decisions now about which platform to base their virtualized infrastructure on, Klein said. “If Red Hat can get their Windows drivers out soon, I think they will be well positioned to pick up significant market share in the coming year,” he said (Read Jim Klein’s Enterprise Linux Log guest blog post on Xen and Fedora 7 – J.L.).

Chance of clouds

Moving on, things got a bit cloudy during the press conference as Crenshaw and company (Paul Cormier, v.p engineering; and Brian Stevens, CTO) announced that beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides re-sizeable compute capacity in the cloud.

In a statement that accompanied the press call, Red Hat said the combination of RHEL and Amazon EC2 “changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.”

As part of this partnership, Red Hat Network will offer a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

As far as pricing and availability are concerned, RHEL on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned for the fourth calendar quarter of 2007. Base prices are $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon’s EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.

Red Hat Appliance OS, HO!

The final piece of the pie was the pending release of Red Hat Appliance Operating System, or AOS for short. This ISV-themed OS means that in the very near future (first half of 2008, execs told me), ISVs will be assembling appliances for their customers that run on AOS and work with every certified RHEL application under the sun. Hint: That’s a lot, and was exactly the angle Red Hat executives took on the Wednesday call.

“The Red Hat Appliance Operating System will allow applications that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX and Microsoft Windows Viridian. Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy, also announced today, delivers a standardized development, deployment and management infrastructure for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem,” a statement said. Look for an industry reaction piece from us on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com later in the day.

The Red Hat Appliance Operating System (AOS) is built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with which it shares full ABI and API compatibility. It includes the Virtual Appliance Development Kit (vADK) that will allow ISVs to configure the operating system along with their middleware and applications to produce a complete system image.

Red Hat also announced that a range of software solutions on Red Hat Exchange are available for trial and purchase as pre-configured software appliances. Customers can now purchase and deploy an integrated solution consisting of third-party software, JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The total time necessary to purchase, install and use these solutions is “just minutes,” Crenshaw said.

A lot of PR in this announcement, so we’ll have to see where it goes in 2008. Stay tuned.

I had a great call with First American Title Holding Co. about Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 the other day. Why was it so great? Because it surprised me. I went in expecting one thing and got another. For a reporter, that’s great. It’s an education. It’s like waking up thinking it’s Sunday when it’s really Saturday. Or something like that.

One of the goals I had going in was to get details about First American’s new SUSE Enterprise Linux deployment, as well as some additional bits of file serving goodness from the OES2 they installed on top of it. As it turns out, the creme de la creme was the virtualized NetWare servers they were running using Xen paravirtualizaiton. Many NetWare shops simply cannot migrate off that OS, as the applications are customized and cannot run any other way.

Xen: Ready for OES2’s launch?

With the launch of OES2, Novell is trying really hard to entice those last few NetWare shops to make the leap to Linux. They’re doing this by enticing them with virtual NetWare servers running in Xen. That said, was Xen mature enough for First American’s mission critical NetWare applications? Would it perform as well?

At first glance, things were not looking too good.

Kurt Johnston, a lead engineer on the First American migration, wasn’t optimistic. “I did not have high expectations for Xen,” Johnston told me in a call last week. “With Xen being as young as it is, I was expecting it to be very difficult to install and configure a new domU onto dom0.” Johnston and his boss, IT director Dan McDougall, were also wary of performance issues they had read about in trade magazines and had heard from other users throughout the year.

But they were soon pleasantly surprised, and so was I. Xen wasn’t VMware ESX Server, but it was close enough–at least for First American. That, at least to me, was the surprise. It’s been a 24 hour VMware lovefest for the past two years or so, and I hadn’t been up on the subject enough to see any changes in that dynamic. When I talked with analysts in 2006 and ‘07 I had always heard Xen had plenty of potential, but like any new technology it needed work. Illuminata senior analyst Gordon Haff, speaking to me for the same article, told me that much of the work needed to prove that potential had been completed throughout 2007. It was a collection of hard work and bug fies; not any single thing, he said.

“The fact is, [Xen] was rather simple to install. It was the ease of installation and configuration that surprised me. I was expecting to use quite a bit of [a command line interface],” Johnston said. Fortunately for First American, there was very little CLI, if any. No headaches, no problems–save one.

There was one issue worth noting about Xen, according to Johnson. He said one thing he would like to see in Xen is in “the paravirtualization side of things”:

“I’d like to be able to somehow mask certain virtual machines and only allow certain LUNs [logical unit numbers] on the SAN [storage area network] to serve and see certain virtual machines, via Xen.  I’d like to be able to build in a limit to the different servers to see only specific LUNs on the SAN.”

He went on to say that having the ability to visualize the host bus adapter (HBA) and use Xen to manage virtual Fibre Channel ports would allow LUN masking of these ports and give the ability to grant access to only specified LUNs.

This capability is also still an issue in VMware environments as well, but a support update for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) in VMware ESX 3.5 was announced earlier this month.

Fixes from XenSource, Novell

But what about XenSource, the corporate entity behind the Xen hypervisor? Or Novell, which was the first commercial Linux OS vendor to bake Xen into its OS? Was a fix forthcoming for those Novell OES2 customers, like Johnston and McDougall, that wanted the same functionality in their environments? Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, responded to that question regarding support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) via email this morning. He said:

“It’s planned ASAP for XenSource products (Q1 08). The Xen project doesn’t have a storage roadmap - just the hypervisor. Whether any vendor puts a particular storage technology into its product is up to that vendor.”

Novell is working on a multi-vendor fix: “We are working on N_Port Virtualization together with Qlogic and Emulex,” said Holger Dryoff, vice president of management and marketing at Novell. “This will be available in one of the future service packs of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and therefore to OES 2 customers as well.”

I find all of this interesting because it will mean more choices. More choices means competition, and competition means happier customers. Happier customers are more apt to speak to the press and tell their stories. Whether the technology ultimately makes the customers happy, well, that’s what we’re here to find out.

First, there was the great iPhone 1.11 update bricking debacle. Today, it’s the great Linux kernel 2.6.23 conspiracy?

Admittedly, that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as an iPhone story. That said, I think the implications for today’s revelations about 2.6.23 are far more important to the tech community than some gadget-of-the-moment touch screen phone could ever hope to be.

Andrew Kutz, blogging for our sister site SearchServerVirtualization.com, claimed today that the 2.6.23 release of the Linux kernel breaks VMware Server while at the same time boosts the street cred of Xen and KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine.

[T]he new Linux Kernel, 2.6.23 was released on 2007/10/09. The latest product of the world’s greatest hackers includes a bevy of new features, including increased support for Xen and KVM, two open-source virtualization solutions. Users of those products are probably very happy today, eagerly awaiting the adoption of the new kernel by their favorite distribution in order to take advantage of the increased guest support that comes with it. VMware Server users on the other hand are getting the proverbial shaft. Kernel 2.6.23 has one MAJOR change and one minor change that completely break VMware Server.

I’m not as up to speed on VMware and its relation to the Linux kernel as I ought to be, but Kurtz’s post brought me up to speed pretty quickly. Apparently, fixes for the two problems are not easily executed, which kind of leaves this whole issue flapping in the wind.

Then again, maybe that was the idea, Kurtz waxes hypothetically: “perhaps most interesting of all is the timing. The same Kernel that provides extended support for Xen and KVM also breaks VMware Server. Coincidence? Like I said, I try to air on the side of optimism. How about you?”

I’m a cynical optimist, and I know how important Xen and KVM are in the open source community. I guess that leaves me “undecided” on this issue. What say you?