[CentOS] VMware (was Re: current bind version)

Fri Feb 25 14:36:30 UTC 2011
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Feb 25, 2011, at 5:48 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:

> On 02/24/2011 10:47 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 2/24/11 8:56 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 03:44:32PM +1300, Machin, Greg wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> <snip of good information>
>>> 
>>>> Rather use ESXi 4.1 and get
>>>> up and running quickly. If your hardware is not on the supported list
>>>> there are other lists of tested hardware where people have it running on
>>>> "Unsupported" hardware.
>>>> 
>>>> Player is not a solution if the Virtual machine needs to be running
>>>> 24/7. It's more suited to testing and demo use.
>>> 
>>> Agreed--I haven't really found server, however, to be all that great for
>>> 24/7, so I assumed (and we know what happens when one assumes), that it
>>> was being used for testing.  For any sort of production use, ESXi 4.1 is
>>> quite good.
>> 
>> Player isn't good for most of my usage because most of the time I don't want the 
>> console display at all - I just connect to the guests remotely with 
>> freenx/ssh/vnc when necessary.  And I have Server 1.x setups that have run for 
>> years with no attention or downtime.  I agree that ESXi is better, but it wasn't 
>> free when I built the VMs and I'm running some native Centos stuff on the host 
>> along with several guests.
>> 
>> Anyway, my point was that the fabled library ABI stability of RHEL turned out 
>> not to work for VMware Server 2.0.   But CentOS did come through with 
>> bug-for-bug compatibility as promised, causing the same crashing behavior after 
>> the same minor-rev update.
>> 
> 
> The ABI is not for things like VMWare when they screw up their updates
> ... it is for custom 3rd party software that you have spent
> $1,000,000.00 having developed that will stop working when the ABI changes.
> 
> In the case of VMWare, they support RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. out
> of the box and they made a mistake with their RH compile.
> 
> #1 is a far bigger issue than #2.

Also, VMware could have made their module load across kernel updates without recompile if they had set their kernel module up to support KABI (kernel ABI) tracking, but they didn't.

-Ross