[xen-tools-discuss] Re: What's the best distro for Xen dom0?

[Henning Sprang]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Mike Bailey <mike at bailey.net.au> wrote:
> It seems my preferred distros have reduced their commitment to Xen. I've
> been reading that Debian (lenny) and Ubuntu (Intrepid) ship without Xen
> dom0's.
> I'm not sure Xen is such a bad choice given that big players like Amazon
> ec2, EngineYard, Slicehost, etc all use it.
>
> So, do I switch to one of my less preferred distros like Centos as a more
> solid Xen platform?

Redhat is dropping Xen, too :) As far as I know, Fedora 10 is without
Xen support.
And Redhatr is building many products (see ovirt etc.) based on KVM.

Basically, Xen is a quite nice and stable technology.
The problem is, with the business model behind the commercial products
of XenSource and now Citrix, that they are not interested that the
real Open Source solutions are fully stable and easily useable for end
users.

So, for example, they were not porting their XenLinux Patches to newer
Kernel versions than 2.6.18.
They worked on getting another type of Xen Support for domU and dom0
into the mainline kernel, but had no success for a very long time,
then domU was available, but dom0 not - and IÄm not sure about the
current state.

My opinion is, yes, Xen is stable and a good technology, but it's not
really user-friendly, and it's main developers do not care much about
that. That wasn't a problem for Xen until there was an opensource
technology that could do similar things.
Now that there is a good competitor, I'm also thinking about dropping
Xen - it seems KVM is stable enough - it can be used on servers and
the desktop, and it's open source versions are usable with ease.

Henning