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| Red Hat Virtualization Manager Requires Windows |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2009-11-06 23:41:37 |
| "As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat's new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers. You'd be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft's Windows Server. That's no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system. According to Red Hat, the plan is to have a Linux version ready by some point in 2010. But in the meantime, Red Hat customers who want to run the virtualization manager must purchase or already own a Windows server." |
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| Understandable |
| By Lennie on 2009-11-07 00:13:47 |
| "Anytime we acquire a company, there is work to go from a proprietary code base to open source," |
 - Score: 2 |
| Very smart Red Hat, very smart... |
| By sergio on 2009-11-07 00:31:09 |
|
1. VMware vSphere requires Windows. 2. RHEV requires Windows. 3. You can migrate from VMware vSphere to RHEV re-using all your existing infrastructure. 4. Profit! |
| - Score: 1 |
| The Irony |
| By segedunum on 2009-11-07 01:01:46 |
|
Supposedly this was done because of time-to-market issues and they were going to think of a Java web based version and some Linux GUI tools later. Yes, the management layer was written for Windows, .Net, SQL Server and Windows Presentation Foundation. You didn't read the requirements wrong. They've had a pretty reasonable amount of time to come up with something that runs on their own systems. It really speaks volumes as to the state of producing any kind of user-facing GUI system on your average Linux system today and it was a very poor advert for Red Hat and Linux to people already using Xen or VMware. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Did I understnad correctly? |
| By sukru on 2009-11-07 01:41:55 |
|
So they bought a enterprise virtualization system, which has Windows 2003 based servers and WPF (.Net) based user interface. It currently requires both the server and management console to be run on Windows machines. And instead of benefiting from existing mono infrastructure, they'll rewrite the whole system in another language (probably Java). The only conclusion I can come up with is that RedHat really despises mono. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: The Irony |
| By doctor on 2009-11-07 02:24:50 |
|
I think that a large portion of the customers who want this kind of product would already have Windows systems in their environment. Especially if they're already using an alternative like VMWare vSphere, which another post noted requires Windows too. > They've had a pretty reasonable amount of time to come up with something that runs on their own systems. They bought Qumranet 14 months before the GA release of the product. In that time they'd need to fix bugs and polish it to the point that's it suitable for release - I'd expect a better first release from someone like Red Hat than a small startup. They'd presumably need to train support people and a whole bunch of other things too. Not requiring Windows would either have meant rewriting the whole GUI bit (requiring a *lot* more development and QA), or suddenly supporting Mono and probably rewriting large chunks which use things Mono doesn't implement. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Did I understnad correctly? |
| By ndrw on 2009-11-07 09:28:11 |
|
Certainly the fact that Mono is sponsored and controlled by their competitor doesn't help, neither does the unclear legal status. But all the politics aside, I fail to see how using Mono instead of Java would help them porting the whole thing faster. In either case they have to rewrite it from scratch, perhaps tweaking parts of the design along the way. And with all the Java know-how RedHat has, and maturity of Java itself, I'm not surprised seeing they chose it instead of Mono. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Did I understnad correctly? |
| By ebasconp on 2009-11-07 19:41:30 |
|
> Certainly the fact that Mono is sponsored and controlled by their competitor doesn't help, neither does the unclear legal status. I think depending on an open source platform sponsored by a competitor like Novell is better than using a closed platform sponsor like MS. Anyway, Mono has a very legal status; Microsoft published a "Community promise" (http://www.microsoft.com/interop...) when they say you are sure developing any implementation of several technologies, including C# and their base libraries; in other hand, Mono has developed a nice ecosystem with their own classes useful to develop new things from that with no danger of being sued. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Did I understand correctly? |
| By sukru on 2009-11-07 19:50:34 |
|
My impression was a significant portion of the code was already written in C#, making porting almost trivial (Novell provides tools to automate Windows -> Linux .Net migration). There might also be C# -> Java source code converters, too. But I don't think it will be as efficient as using the same language / libraries across platforms. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Did I understnad correctly? |
| By Rahul on 2009-11-07 21:20:17 |
|
Guys, This is NOT a codebase that will work in Linux using Mono. It depends on too many MS specific technologies and was developed by Qumranet and used in production systems already with several customers before the Red Hat acquisition. The effort to port it to using Mono is not going to be very different from the effort to rewrite it using Java and release it as open source with having to worry about "community promises" from Microsoft which doesn't cover anything beyond base libraries. |
| - Score: 1 |
| Hmmmm |
| By aaronb on 2009-11-07 23:49:05 |
|
Maybe Redhat should look at one of their own sites: http://virt-manager.et.redhat.co... |
| - Score: 2 |
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