Red Hat Accuses Novell of Being ‘Irresponsible’ About Xen

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime-time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises’ first experiences with Xen.

The Xen technology lets users run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware, allowing for the better utilization of resources.

Novell has baked Xen into its current SLES 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) product, which shipped last month. Red Hat is including it in its upcoming RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) release slated to ship late this year or early 2007.

“What makes us most nervous is putting a bad taste in someone’s mouth around the Xen technology, which we think is business transforming. We should not screw this thing up and put a cloud around Xen,” Stevens told eWEEK Aug. 16 in an interview.

There has been a lot of speculation about whether Xen is actually ready for prime time. Click here to read more.

“I would much rather a customer had a solid experience with Xen. I think they [Novell] are being cavalier. We know what we need to be enterprise-ready and we already have a checklist of everything we need for that. They [Novell] have decided it’s more important to be first. That’s fine and maybe makes sense for them,” he said.

For his part, Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe told eWEEK in an interview at the LinuxWorld Expo that the company had done an enormous amount of testing and firmly believed the Xen technology was ready.

“Could it be that Red Hat is embarrassed about the fact that they are six months late? This is the most transparent ploy and contradicts their own press release in March where they said Xen was ready. It’s totally a joke,” he said.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Red Hat Accuses Novell of Being ‘Irresponsible’ About Xen