CentOS - Nov 2008 - Stop the FUD Xen is not deprecated

Do people have wet underwear for nothing over XEN?

See http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/

<snip>
Q: Will Red Hat continue to support and contribute to Xen?

A: Yes. Red Hat will support Xen until at least 2014 
(seven years after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5). 
We are committed to insulating our customers from changes in 
the infrastructure components and this is why we created an open 
virtualization management standard (the Libvirt API). This 
standard is provided in Red Hat products and has been adopted 
by a number of other vendors (Sun, Novell, Ubuntu, etc.). 
It allows customers and ISVs to build virtualization management 
applications, processes and configurations based on a stable API, 
independent of the underlying virtualization technology.

Red Hat continues to be an active member of the Xen development 
community and is currently working on further integration work 
between the Xen hypervisor and the Linux kernel.

</snip>
 
As far as CentOS is concerned saying Xen is deprecated is
jumping the gun. CentOS ships with Xen and as long as upstream 
supports it, CentOS by extension supports it.

Regards,
Vandaman.

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Vandaman <vandaman2002-sk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Do people have wet underwear for nothing over XEN?
>
> See http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/
>
> As far as CentOS is concerned saying Xen is deprecated is
> jumping the gun. CentOS ships with Xen and as long as upstream
> supports it, CentOS by extension supports it.
Thank you for the clarification.

What isn't clear from reading the above referenced material is if Xen
will be included in future CentOS releases.

Brett

Brett Serkez wrote:
> What isn't clear from reading the above referenced material is if Xen
> will be included in future CentOS releases.

If it's included in future RHEL releases then it will be included
in future CentOS releases.

Red Hat says they will support Xen for the duration of the RHEL 5
support cycle. They haven't specified whether or not Xen will be
an option in RHEL 6, at least I haven't seen a statement around
that yet. If it's not in RHEL6 it won't be shipped in CentOS 6
(maybe it will be made available via 3rd party repositories).

So if you plan to use CentOS 5.x for the next several years then
you have nothing to worry about if you want to stick to Xen.
I really wouldn't expect significant effort to be put into
Xen in the future beyond fixing bugs and stuff. If you want
a fully supported Xen go get it from Citrix.

I've been watching Xen myself since it first came out and never
found it compelling so it's kind of vindication for me as I've
had justify not using Xen a few times in the past couple years.

nate

Brett Serkez wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Vandaman <vandaman2002-sk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> Do people have wet underwear for nothing over XEN?
>>
>> See http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/
>>
>> As far as CentOS is concerned saying Xen is deprecated is
>> jumping the gun. CentOS ships with Xen and as long as upstream
>> supports it, CentOS by extension supports it.
> 
> Thank you for the clarification.
> 
> What isn't clear from reading the above referenced material is if Xen
> will be included in future CentOS releases.
> 
Which is why I originally wrote...

"*Some* are interpreting this... as an indication that xen will be 
dropped from RHEL6 as they direct their efforts towards KVM."

*If* xen is not included in RHEL6 then it will, by definition, be 
deprecated in favour of KVM irrespective of whether (or not) RH 
continues to support it throughout the life of RHEL5. Note that xen was 
dropped (not deprecated, dropped) in Fedora 10, read into that what you 
will :)

So xen isn't technically deprecated yet, but if I were a betting man, I 
wouldn't be putting all my eggs in a virtualized xen basket.

Some might choose to call that FUD, and that's their prerogative. In a 
way they're right as Red Hat's statement on xen does contain elements of
uncertainty and doubt as they have not committed to continued ongoing 
support of xen past the current RHEL5 product lifecycle, and that may 
make some fearful for it's long term future within the Red Hat landscape.