Jeff Gould at Interop News wrote a very long and interesting article on Xen market status
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Suffice it to say there has been a lot of excitement and optimism in the pundit community about Xen.
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But now that Novell and Red Hat have both been shipping Xen in their commercial Linux distributions for some months, things have grown eerily quiet. Sure, there is still product news coming out of the Xen vendors, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But what I’d really like to know is – who’s actually using this stuff in production? And I mean actual end-user organizations, not ISPs or hosters. Based on the absence of Xen-related chatter, my guess is that production users of Xen are still few and far between.
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Taking Novell, Red Hat, XenSource and Virtual Iron together, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a dozen named reference customers for Xen.
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If we take off our open source blinders for a moment and look at Xen objectively, we can begin to spot a few of the flaws that appear to be holding it back.
The first problem with Xen is that as a piece of software it is far less mature than VMware ESX.
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Then there is the question of performance.
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A year ago I thought that Xen offered Red Hat a huge opportunity to take some market share from Microsoft before the release of Longhorn (Windows Server 2008). Apparently Red Hat thought so too, because they planned and promoted the release of the all-important RHEL5 around Xen, even delaying the launch date by several months to smooth out the snags encountered in the integration effort.
But today it’s apparent that however Xen evolves in the future, it isn’t going to be the Longhorn killer Red Hat thought it would be…
Read the whole article at source.