OpenStack Ditches Microsoft Hyper-V 73
judgecorp writes "The OpenStack open source cloud project has removed Hyper-V from its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) framework, saying Microsoft's support for its hypervisor technology is 'broken.' This will embarass Microsoft, as major partners such as Dell and HP support OpenStack, along with service providers such as Internap." Adds reader alphadogg, this "means the code will be removed when the next version of OpenStack, called Essex, is released in the second quarter."
Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:2)
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It's easy to just ditch any Microsoft technology. But for once, Hyper-v isn't totally crap. It's a way better than ESXi, and comparable to Xen (in fact, they got their inspiration from working with Xen guys, and the architecture is the same as for Xen). The issue here, btw, wasn't hyper-v itself, just its support inside OpenStack.
i realize what the article was about, i was simply making an observation based on parent comment. however, saying hyper-v is better than esxi is a laughable statement at best. you've clearly been using different products than i have.
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you smoking?
ESXi is miles above Xen at this point, and I'd rather use VirtualBox than Hyper-V. XenServer doesn't even enter the equation.
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hyper-v isn't totally crap its totally shit compared to vsphere.
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:5, Informative)
HyperV has many more dependencies than other virtualization stuff.
For example,.if your host and management client are not in the same AD domain but you want to use MMC to remote manage a HyperV host (say you do not want to allow multiple people to remote desktop to the host), to configure the permissions and other stuff you often have to download and run an _unsupported_ tool: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote [microsoft.com]
Or wade through 5 pages of stuff:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2008/03/28/part-1-hyper-v-remote-management-you-do-not-have-the-requested-permission-to-complete-this-task-contact-the-administrator-of-the-authorization-policy-for-the-computer-computername.aspx [technet.com]
And even so, it often still doesn't work, e.g. the added firewall rules might not work for some stupid reason and you have to turn off the firewalls completely.
In contrast with VMware you need a lot few number of ports opened to do remote management, and you normally won't have problems getting remote management. In fact it's almost a "given" that you'd be mainly using remote management.
HyperV may also not work so well if you're not running Linux guests. Recently a colleague had a problem with a Linux guest- some (ICMP echo) frames/packets were being sent but not others (ARP replies)! I solved it by restarting the hyper-v virtual switch. Perhaps that HyperV server was not updated. Whatever it is, even vmware GSX server years ago caused me fewer problems than HyperV.
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to just ditch any Microsoft technology. But for once, Hyper-v isn't totally crap. It's a way better than ESXi, and comparable to Xen (in fact, they got their inspiration from working with Xen guys, and the architecture is the same as for Xen). The issue here, btw, wasn't hyper-v itself, just its support inside OpenStack.
It's not that easy to ditch any MS technology - they built their company on tie-in, both for technical reasons and licensing reasons.
Their products work so well together that it's easy to get locked in. You start with MS-Office on Windows, then as your office grows you add a Windows Fileserver and AD server to manage the workstations and an Exchange server since it integrates well with Outlook and Outlook comes free with Office. Your accounting system runs on SQL/Server and you want to see more detailed reports so you add a reporting server. So many people want to see real-time reports so you add a Sharepoint server.
Now you've got a half dozen (or more) Window servers running your office. When it comes time to build your website, well you've already got Windows admins and developers, so .Net is the natural platform to use. You've committed yourself to buying so many CAL's for various products that new servers don't really cost much, certainly not enough to make it worthwhile to hire a Linux admin and start building on open source.
Oh, and hard-core WIndows developers/admins are just like hard-core Mac and Linux developers/admins - they love their platform and don't want to try anything else.
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Uh... Outlook doesn't come "free with office". In fact, the versions of Office with Outlook are much more expensive than those without. Outlook is the killer app in the group. That said, I agree with the rest of your post.
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Uh... Outlook doesn't come "free with office". In fact, the versions of Office with Outlook are much more expensive than those without. Outlook is the killer app in the group. That said, I agree with the rest of your post.
I'm talking about enterprise licensed Office - I don't know what comes with the consumer/small business Office suites. By the time you're big enough to need an AD server to manage your network, you're big enough for a volume license program.
The "Office Standard 2010" available under their volume licensing program comes with Outlook:
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/office2010.aspx [microsoft.com]
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Even IF a company decides to ditch Windows, it may not be possible. Tons of web-based stuff, particularly in niche industries still only works with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. The Microsoft monoculture is so wide-spread that migrating away from it can make it difficult to do business.
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not hard to believe Hyper-V is broken
About 2 years ago, the Linux kernel devs threatened to kick the Hyper-V kernel driver out of mainline because of lack of maintenance
The original guys from MS who submitted the code just disappeared, not responding to emails or requests for code clean-up
Not sure what MS's game is with Hyper-V, but they don't seem that interested in making a decent hypervisor....
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:4, Informative)
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Citation? References?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Or? Perhaps you are astroturfing.
I agree he should have provided a supporting link (someone else now have, supporting his claims), but can we please stop this crap with calling everybody with dissenting views and claims for astroturfers? What kind of paranoid world do people live in when they believe that everybody who post something they don't like has to be astroturfing. I have seen people with long posting histories of Linux and OSS support been called astroturfers for trying to have nuanced (or factual) comments that are not all "M$
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Not to mention the delusion of thinking Slashdot comments actually are worth any money or effort from major companies.
Exactly, I keep emailing Microsoft, Apple and Google volunteering my services as a paid shill, and they never reply.
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Looks like they are still at the embrace stage since hyper-v is still a new and relatively small player in the market.
The question is, do you think they would be doing anything at all to facilitate running anything other than windows if they dominated the market? More than likely they would actually go out of their way to make it difficult...
If MS succeed in dominating the virtualization market and eliminating vmware/xen/kvm, you can bet that's what will happen...
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Re:Maybe it's just too hard... (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the key passage from the article, should you read it.
The "They" is Microsoft, and the guy saying it is person Microsoft has a liaison for the project.
Also, it is too hard to maintain code you don't have control over. Microsoft drafted someone else to develop the code, that organization was bought by Citrix who owns Zen Hyper-V, a competing project. Again mentioned in the article.
So, this is not just normal Microsoft Bashing by /. (well, it is) this is something that Microsoft deserves. Microsoft better start focusing on core competencies to support of Enterprise Infrastructure and Windows or it is going to find itself shrinking rapidly.
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Does MS want it to work?
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Well, if hyper-v is considerably harder to support than any of its many competitors then that's good reason not to use it... Why expend all that extra effort for something that brings so little extra to the table?
Also hyper-v is take 2 from ms, they previously had a product called "virtual server" which they pushed for a couple of years, and then dropped totally and then later told people to wait for hyper-v... I would be extremely wary about investing in a product from a company that has a history of dropp
Wrong Summary (Score:4, Informative)
As I read the article, it says that OpenStep's support for Hyper-V is broken or incomplete, leading to its removal from of Hyper-V support from the OpenStep codebase. The summary here could be read either as Microsoft support for OpenStep is broken, or Microsoft support for its own Hyper-V product is broken, neither of which appears to be the case.
In other words, OpenStep users haven't adopted Hyper-V widely or spent a lot of time working on the OpenStep code, and so that part of the tree has fallen into disrepair and it's being removed as not having sufficient interest.
That's my guess...perhaps someone with more knowledge could clarify?
“Just as Nova enters feature freeze, it sounds like a good moment to consider removing deprecated, known-buggy-and-unmaintained or useless feature code from the Essex tree, “ he wrote.
In reply, Ken Pepple, director of cloud development at Internap Network Services, wrote: “”Hyper-V support is missing support for even the most basic functions – volumes, Glance, several network managers, etc. We investigated it for our service, but found it only borderline functional.”
But it is Microsoft's code. (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has been trying to push Hyper-V support into Linux, but their original driver code was complete shit, and it's just barely starting to get better. It's almost stable now, but not fully functional. So, yes it is fair to say that Hyper-V support is being removed from OpenStack because Microsoft's support for Hyper-V on Linux has been very poor.
Re:Wrong Summary (Score:5, Informative)
As I read the article
Frankly, you'd better read the Openstack dev list thread about "dead wood cutting" on launchpad [launchpad.net], because that's where the article is taking information from (where else could this info be?). It has *never* been said that OpenStack is "ditching" Hyper-V by the way, but that it's just being removed from the Essex release, because it's currently in frozen state (currently only bugfix are accepted, until Essex is released), and Hyper-V isn't up-to-shape.
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here's Microsoft's press release:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/oct10/10-22openstackpr.mspx
I wouldn't doubt for a minute though that the reason for the original cloud.com partnership was for a bullet point on a presentation showing ei
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(if you don't get this joke, search online...)
Read the original ML message (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the ML message (here : https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg07065.html) you'll see all the reasons.
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I read this as "OpenStack support for Hyper-V is unmaintained and/or broken". This does not mean Hyper-V is broken, but it does mean that Microsoft either did not contribute to OpenStack or what they contribute sucks.
While this is not quite the same a "Hyper-V" sucks, it is very close to "Microsoft support for Hyper-V sucks".
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But there are bugs logged against Hyper-V and they haven't gotten satisfactory resolution. Since random programmers can't fix bugs or implement missing features then that falls under "broken" and should be removed if they want to move into a "candidate for release" state.
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Well, the core problem is that either Microsoft does not care about OpenStack or they are doing their well-known and world-famous incompetent engineering. My personal interpretation is that this is a warning to them.
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If Hyper-V goes, I go. (Score:2)
This is what confuses me... (Score:2)
Why is it remotely interesting to use Hyper-V with Openstack even in theory? MS has their own tooling and if you don't want to use it, why would you want Hyper-V over the more spiritually similar Xen or KVM hypervisors? I've been in a few situations where people have mentioned this but aside from an academic concept of 'completeness', I haven't heard an explanation of the practical relevance of the combination instead of leaving the proprietary stacks to their own efforts.
Re:This is what confuses me... (Score:4, Informative)
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Ok, licensing argument sounds interesting, if not blatantly anti-competitive.
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Why is it remotely interesting to use Hyper-V with Openstack even in theory?
For all sorts of reasons, one of them having a full support for EC2 and S3 APIs.
A Solid Decision (Score:4, Interesting)
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I manage a multiple large vSphere clusters (50 or so ESXi servers each per vcenter) and multiple Hyper V clusters (2-12 nodes each per cluster and about 15 clusters). Installing, managing, and maintining the ESX clusters takes about 10% of the time even though we have 3x as many ESX servers. Installing, mananging, and maintaining the MS Hyper V clusters takes the other 90%. I'll admit, I have been working with ESX since the 2.x days and although I've been maintaining MS servers for 12 or so years, I;ve
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Hyper V software is much lower actual initial cost but getting an overall cost is above my level but i have some ideas. We went with 2008 Data Center edition and that added cost (which could pay off as we add more 2008 Servers to the Hyper V VM pools). Hardware savings goes to ESX, in our specific environment, we can put more VMs on ESX than Hyper V and get the same performance. On the desktop side, Hyper V with Xen provides a much better end user expereince than VMView. The negative is Hyper V/Xen requ
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Yes, MS logging sometimes is overly obtuse and opaque. There seems to be a generalized aversion of putting data into the log, maybe trying not to disclose sensitive information with the error, but it leads to useless error messages in general.
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Too hard?!? (Score:3)
Isn't this more about interface contracts? (Score:2)
Hyper-V contributions to OpenStack by Microsoft initially worked, or they wouldn't have been accepted.
There's no such thing as "bit rot", there are only people who fail to maintain binary backward compatibility in their products as they move forward, as OpenStack has done here.
Lack of interface contracts is probably one of the biggest barriers to commercial software sales in Open Source environments. I don't blame OpenStack for dropping the support, but I do blame them for breaking binary compatibility, an
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The world moves on, and things have to change in order to improve...
Sure, the initial design could have been better and thus more flexible and easier to adapt to change, for instance the basic design of unix hasn't changed much and the basic unix design now powers huge numbers of different devices. But still, there are limits and always unforeseen new requirements.
MS have subjected their customers to this many times too, there are many situations where compatibility has been broken, or even worse situations
Let's try a different analogy (Score:2)
The last analogy was a reference to the book "Who Moved My Cheese?". But you didn't like it, so let's try another one.
A commercial company is like a large cargo ship loaded with containers, and an Open Source project is like a sail boat. If you want to move a lot of freight reliably in one trip, you use the cargo ship. If you want to be able to change direction quickly to explore a lot of directions and could care less about cargo, you use the sailboat.
But a sailboat that wants to lead a cargo ship aroun
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Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good...
OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility...
Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress.
Windows retains a fairly high level of backwards compatibility, but its not perfect and it comes at a huge cost in the form of some very crufty hacks, mas
I call BS. (Score:2)
Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good...
OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility...
Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress.
That's BS. Apple maintained binary backward compatibility with 68K Mac OS for multiple releases, then kept maintaining support for older programs using the Blue Box (Classic) environment. When the Intel switchover happened, they again maintained binary compatibility with PPC software over several releases using Rosetta.
Carbon was a stopgap solution that was not intended to survive transition to native APIs, yet stayed around far longer than it should have. It finally got shot in the head when 64 bit GUI
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Sure Apple make an effort to maintain compatibility, but that effort is as you pointed out limited, typically to 3 release cycles... At which point, the older stuff is cut off completely.
Solaris 11 can still run binaries from the first versions of Solaris (early 90s), it might even be able to run bins from sunos 4.x still tho i don't have any to try.
Windows 7 can still run most win32 binaries from NT3, and some dos and win16 binaries.
Linux can still run a.out binaries and older libc5 compiled bins (although
You're side-tracking. (Score:2)
You're side-tracking.
Hyper-V got "broken" over a single release by an arbitrary OpenStack change that didn't try at all.
Hyper-V was broken by OpenStack in less than the 3 year amortization schedule for computer hardware and software permitted by FAS (Federal Accounting Standards). If they want to be taken as a serious comercial-competitive product, they have to permit the accountants to keep old software they work with around 3 years.
Your OS X examples all have one thing in common: 5-10 years before the of