As worldwide press announced already the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now including Xen.
What the press forgot to mention is all delay Red Hat accumulated for this lauch (initially planned in late 2006) and fierce critics it moved against Novell, when they included Xen in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.
At that time (just 6 months ago) Red Hat claimed Xen wasn’t ready for an enterprise environment, but today we discovers RHEL 5 only supports 4 virtual machines until the release of a RHEL Advanced Platform with unlimited VMs support.
At the same time Red Hat is not providing any enterprise class management tool for Xen, counting on early-stage Virtual Machine Manager for VMs basic administration.
So, at today, the company doesn’t seem able to provide a more enterprise-ready solution than its competitor Novell, and customers looking for Xen virtualization should wonder why they should prefer RHEL 5 over XenEnterprise or Virtual Iron.