Skip to main content

Citrix-XenSource Deal may anger open source community, says Gartner

Just take a look at all those sites and blogs wearing the "Boycott Novell" logo and you'll know what it means in terms of reputational damage. I sure don't hope that the Xen developers are left in the dark and the community that has heavily depended on Xen's source.

Gartner analyst George Weiss said that XenSource chief Peter Levine has to make a concerted effort in order to retain the loyalty of the open-source Xen developers. Otherwise, he said, the open-source community may look at the future of the Xen project destiny with too much uncertainty to continue supporting it.

"The possible downside here is the open-source community might see that technology being co-opted by a larger conglomerate of proprietary company that may use the open source as a vehicle toward the financial gains and monetary rewards of this Citrix-XenSource company," Weiss said.

Weiss said that the move could even cause companies such as Red Hat and Novell toward alternative technologies, such as Qumranet's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), a Linux kernel infrastructure for supporting virtualisation.



Read the rest here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

OS Virtualization comparison: Parallels' Virtuozzo vs the rest

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...