A virtual war is brewing between Red Hat and Novell on how ready Xen is for business use. In the latest development, Novell Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe has accused Red Hat of flip-flopping in its support for the popular Linux virtualization software.
Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens recently accused Novell of “being cavalier [with Xen]. We know what we need to be enterprise-ready and we already have a checklist of everything we need for that. They [Novell] have decided its more important to be first. Thats fine and maybe makes sense for them,” he said.
Novell has an entirely different take on the matter.
Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe said of Red Hats accusations: “Red Hat has adopted the John Kerry approach to virtualization: constant flip-flopping. Lets not forget that until recently Red Hat not only supported Xen, they wanted it to be part of Linux.”
In October 2005, Stevens had said that part of the Red Hat emerging technology teams efforts would be to implement Xen virtualization as part of the Linux kernel, rather than as part of a sidebar project.
Xen technology lets users run multiple operating systems as guest virtual machines on the same hardware, allowing for the better utilization of resources.