Dear Red Hat…

Dear Red Hat,

I know it’s been a while — I’ve just needed some time to process what happened between us.

It’s hard to believe that we’d end up here, after all we’ve been through together.  When I needed a service console to manage my hypervisor, you were my first choice — and you were always there for me.  Well, except for those times when I badly needed some upstream RPMs updated… but I’m over that now.  Just about.

But over the years you changed and you are just not the distro I once knew.  I tried to look the other way when you started running around with Xen.  I knew it wouldn’t last.  Talk to Xen much anymore?  I didn’t think so.

How could you drag licensing into the picture?  For all the talk of open source this and GPL2 that, it never made sense that you would let anyone run unlimited RHEL guests only when you are a Xen Dom0 — but not when I am the hypervisor.  Isn’t a guest OS a guest OS?  I guess not.  You got selfish and frankly, people thought you were being a bully.

So you got tired of Xen and started looking around for satisfaction from another, huh?  How’s that KVM working out for you?  I hate to be the one to point this out, but your virtualization manager runs exclusively on Windows and is only accessible through Internet Explorer.  Have you completely forgotten that you are a Linux distribution! I hate for you to hear this from me, but Ubuntu and SUSE have been making fun of you for months.

You and your KVM are going to be too Linux-y for the Windows guys, and too Windows-y for the open source crowd.  I’m concerned about your reckless behavior.  That makes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization the worst of both worlds.  You’re not thinking about hurting yourself, are you “RHEV”?  I would not even be surprised to find out that you use Bing as your search engine now.  Sorry, that was a low blow.

So you heard about the ESXi no-more-service-console thing, huh?  Well, I moved on, lost some weight, and am ready for the next phase now.

If you ever need a hypervisor to run on, you know where to find me.

Best friends forever,

VMware “Elastic Sky” ESX

[Disclaimer for the humor impaired: Eric Gray does not speak for VMware, nor does he speak for any personified software products.]

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19 Responses to Dear Red Hat…

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - get the worst of both worlds with RHEV | VCritical -- Topsy.com

  2. Ewan says:

    I really want to see how RHEV-H works out, I’ve tried to get a demo installation but there’s been absolutely no luck, I got passed from RedHat to a reseller who wanted me to buy the full Linux distribution but when I said I wanted RHEV he just got confused then said I couldn’t have it, but he could set up a proof of concept installation by one of his consultants.

    Instead, I downloaded Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and installed it in about an hour, it definitely needs the web interface extending to allow for full management, but I’ve not worried about missing out on RHEV since.

  3. Ewan says:

    Hi Ewan,
    getting a RHEV eval does seem to be a mission impossible.

    I actually managed to get one (as a partner) after attending an in-person class and a webinar – but haven’t had the time to test it out yet. (Shame on me.)
    From what I saw in the class though, it still looks *very* rough around the edges. (Including, but not limited to, needing a separate, fysical Windows management machine.)

    Sure, they’ve got a new hypervisor that supposedly has a good performance, but hypervisors are basically free right now, and the added value comes from the management. Which is where RHEV seems to be lacking right now..

  4. Jason Ruiz says:

    Haha, Yeah I agree with some of that there. I don’t know if RHL has it, but CentOS does have Virt-Manager and Virsh available in their distro which can not only manage KVM, but Xen too. I’ve had good run ins and bad run ins with both of those technologies and I think KVM was definitely a better choice than Xen is now.

  5. deepee says:

    ESX 5 will be “i” only? consoleless? enlight us Eric 🙂

    • Eric Gray says:

      That’s correct. It has been announced by VMware that ESXi is the future direction and classic ESX will no longer be available in the next major release.

      • deepee says:

        I can hear the community torn apart. For some – it will be disaster not to able to logon to console and do all the tricks with the only allowed interface – putty. 🙂 For others, like me, simplicity is best, not having console port, less updates, quicker load time, etc… Nice…

    • Brandon says:

      Hopefully its not as far off as ‘5’, hopefully its in the next in betweener, sort of like 3.5 was to the 3.x series. 4.1? who knows ;). I don’t want to wait another year+ for it to start forcing people I work around to move on.

  6. kgabriel says:

    Greedy? I have seen the cost of a VMWare renewal to a customer. THAT is greedy…

    For some customers, the cost of their VMWare environment is more expensive than the hardware and the OS costs…

    THAT is pure greed.

    BTW, VMWare… why did you buy Springsource and Zimbra and RabbitMQ? I thought you were a HYPERVISOR.

    • Dmitry says:

      I wonder, who uses Red Hat and for what purpose? Seriously, what is the benefit: tech support or something? I know from my experience that desktop users really need latest software, it’s a fact.This is so much not Red Hat. So, the only niche for Red Hat is probably servers, where CentOS (yes, I know, it’s basically Red Hat) or Debian rules. So, what is the purpose of using Red Hat?

  7. kgabriel says:

    Dmitry,

    If you really think CentOS and Debian “rules” servers, you should do more homework. Red Hat runs in enterprise environments where stability, certification, tech support and having a trusted technology partner are essential.

  8. Jaime says:

    Dunno what’s all the fuzz about RHEV-M on Windows….

    “The VirtualCenter Server is supported as a service on the 32‐bit versions of these operating systems:
    Windows 2000 Server SP4 with Update Rollup 1 (Update Rollup 1 can be downloaded from here )
    Windows XP Pro SP2
    Windows 2003 Server SP1 (all releases except 64‐bit)
    Windows 2003 Server R2”

    So, it’s just like that. One vendor can make Windows a requirement but another no? IMHO vCritical = vFUD

  9. IanH says:

    This site should not be called vcritical but RHcritical or perhaps vmwarefanbois. The vmware rhetoric is in my opinion quite sickening.

    • Marius says:

      Most definitely this should be vFUD. RH is not just an OS vendor as much as VMware is not just a hypervisor vendor.

      I am quite sure VMware wishes they were an os vendor and lets not overlook vmware little silly move the past weeks with the new licensing. They are the ones being greedy and in the end they screwed you, me, their customers and partners and will continue to do so.

      RedHat is not far behind but lets be serious its like comparing hitler to bush jr.

  10. Marius says:

    I keep forgetting and you keep mentioning this. Yes its windows based, they did what vmware has always done, rush to market to get market share. Its normal business, the difference is that RH will soon switch to a linux console and if they keep true to their spirit as they have done in the past (see netscape planet) they will open source their software under gpl2 this or that and in the end the community wins. you are also part of the community.

    free software might be the only chance we have at peace so give it a chance …

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