On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 15:26 +0200, Zoran Popović wrote: > I suppose I was ranting here a lot, and I also apologize if I did any > unnecessary harm. It is the product of living on a user's front line > far from system integrators or stock exchange markets with strange > 64-bit hardware or mainframes. Maybe I have over-exaggerated > significance of Xen for the open source, or it might contribute > separately from RHEL better really.
Red Hat needs input from customers. Red Hat representatives will take time to understand customer needs. I would advise everyone here to ensure their representatives are aware of their needs. If you cannot reach your representative, seek out consultants, solutions architects and others with Red Hat who have helped on-list or off-list. It's one thing to talk to other customers on forums like this, but another to ask directly as well. Customers who have deployed Xen will continue to receive support, and Red Hat is still taking feature requests (per Phase I) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 5 through 2011. It is important that all customers take advantage of these avenues to ensure they are receiving the service and features they require. KVM was added to the product line in 5.4 (and maintained with RHEV), but Xen was not and is not dropped. Please do so before early 2011 to ensure needs are met. > Also, put aside my view about Itanium's destiny, and my ranting about > it. But there are some points I've made that are left somewhat > unnoticed, of which one I find most interesting: what about HP Blade > infrastructure and Red Hat's involvement about it (which is very > low) ? I'm going to go out on a stretch here (I'm sure I'm overstepping some lines) and ask all Red Hat customers to consider something. If you feel a piece of hardware is not being addressed well, please, please contact your independent hardware vendor (IHV) and request they send the exact configuration (or a model capable of the configuration) to Red Hat. If there is a combination of hardware, network, storage, etc..., that would be ideal to request (especially if the same vendor provides all). This is the PC world. Instead of a half dozen models, there are hundreds of models, with hundreds more variations. Instead of just one or two system boards, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds. Red Hat itself is also not releasing SPARC, Power, etc... workstations X, Y and Z, enterprise models A, B and C, and does not have control over them either. It's the first thing I explain to customers not only coming from RISC/UNIX, but also when the customer is considering the UNIX vendor's PC version, not realizing they will have the same PC world "lack of control." Especially since several UNIX vendors outsource even their branded PC platforms, much less the other PC options. Just some things to keep in-mind. Red Hat does have a testing suite, a release model for unit, integration and regression testing with IHV and independent software vendor (ISV) products. The statement of "Red Hat's involvement" does point the finger in a direction that isn't the one that I would agree it should go. I'm biased, of course, but I've not merely felt this way for many years now, but run into it. It's amazing what Red Hat finds out and identifies on a piece of hardware (like required firmware updates, issues with hardware errata, etc...) when it has the hardware models in house and can duplicate the exact configuration. Again, I'm probably overstepping a line by saying this, but I do ask customers to at least ask IHVs whenever these things come up, especially the less common the configuration (or even if not). > Mostly I would like to see RHEV beside VMWare and Hyper-V (RH has only > some initiative about making RHEL/Jboss templates for VMWare or > similar). On the note of Xen and RHEV, I hope everyone recognizes that Red Hat has most recently taken the lead with RHEV 2.2 (currently beta) which now includes a conversion utility for both Xen and VMware images into the new, open standard OVF format. From OVF, a number of hypervisor and virtualization solutions can be utilized. As far as deployment, I've personally been involved with this for some time now, Xen, VMware, etc... The Cobbler-Koan solutions, among other emerging technologies (ET) have been developed by some really smart people (e.g., Michael DeHaan), to try to create vendor and hypervisor agnostic solutions. There is no "holy grail" although the tools are there, and they are manageable. Where they are not, and other options do exist, please inform your representatives. For those that have been down VMware's deployment route for Linux -- e.g., the Perl framework and other things -- you know what you've run into. Again, as with the IHV, understand that the vendor's focus has a lot to do with this. It is not my place to say anything about VMware, but do recognize where the overwhelming majority of VMware's customer base is. It does factor in, heavily. Some things that are "just there" for Windows guests "just aren't" for Linux, and Microsoft didn't write them either. I wish Red Hat could do everything for other vendors. Unfortunately, the source is just not there to do so and, worse yet, the interfaces change and any solutions written are no longer useful in short order. > In the end, please notice that I am a happy Red Hat customer and I > would always rather step on the side of Linux and Open Source > solutions whenever/wherever it is possible, though I am bound to a > world where it is very hard to achieve it (both for good and bad > reasons). Open source, especially GPL and other Free Software, is about the customer always being right. If the customer does not get what they need, they will go where they can get it. GPL and other Free Software affords this because everyone has the same source to build from, because everyone shares back. Companies like Red Hat must innovate and show value, or customers will consider others. Make your needs known and where others are showing more value, especially to your Red Hat representatives. They can do the most for you, or help you connect with other solutions that do. -- Bryan J Smith Professional, Technical Annoyance Linked Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
