Xen's no killer app ??
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols just missed the ball with his
Xen's no killer app article ;(
First of all he is wrong about the lack of platform support. Xen
supports a lot more platforms than Linux 2.4 en 2.6 , namely lots of BSD
Variants , Plan 9 etc. Sun also seems to have Solaris working on Xen and there exists
a Windows version for Xen which is just not available for the general
public. However with the introduction of the VT Chipsets that issue won't
exist anymore.
As for the lack of management part he is completely missing out on how
you manage an infrastructure, the whole point being that there is no
difference between deploying physical or virtual machines and having
virtual machines only makes it easier for you.
Apart from that there are plenty of tools to manage the actual virtual machine stuff,
ranging from the command line over web interfaces to other stuff that
people have been contributing.
Actually the original python scripts that Xen delivered as management
tools have already been ported to C ,rewritten and modified by other
people , hopefully the best of breed of these tools wil eventually become the Xen
default tools
I do however agree on his claims that in order to really beat the * out
of the competition you have to become better than them and tackle new
issues, not "just improve' their stuff.
On top of that he actually forgets about the point that Xen is Free Software