We just had a 4.4 earthquake in Northern California. The Epi-center was about 20 miles away from my home in Napa. It was centered in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County.

I didn’t feel it because I am currently in Seattle. My wife called me and told me about it. I checked CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and Google New and there was nothing about it. Then I checked the SF Cronicle website, http://www.sfgate.com/ and it was there.

There are a couple of good articles on eweek regarding Xen and VMware not working together nicely. We all know that both VMware and Xen are doing a lot of Linux Kernel work to help optimize it for their own needs. It stands to reason that both Xen and VMware would both be working on the same types of optimizations.

As a result, Andrew Morton, maintainer of the 2.6 kernel stream, is quoted as saying “Xen and VMware both supply huge patch-sets and are both trying to do the same thing, but their technologies don’t work with one another, and we are telling them that we do not want to take one over the other, we want them to talk and work it out.”

To add gas to the fire, Bob Shimp, the vice president of Oracle’s technology business recently stated that “Oracle is losing its patience over this issue and we are going to be pushing harder and harder on everybody to come to the table with a realistic solution”.

Considering the impact of the recent Xensource / Microsoft partnership, this could mean that if Xen and VMware start working together, VMware would inadvertantly be helping Microsoft. Follow the logic, VMware works with Xen to make the Linux kernel more “virtualization friendly”. Xensource in turn, takes those optimizations and shares them with Microsoft.

Scary stuff….

Articles of Interest:

XenSource, VMware Conflict Holds Back Linux Virtualization
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1994793,00.asp

Oracle ‘Losing Patience’ with XenSource, VMware
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1996904,00.asp

Red Hat Wants Xen in Linux Kernel
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1879130,00.asp