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galkk • 10/11/2024 • 2 replies • view on HN

    “I tried the beta and it couldn’t complete the installer if I set my regional options to en-AU.”

    “Umm… that’s just a cosmetic issue.”

    “It’s a hypervisor kernel, it is going to host tens of thousands of our most critical applications and it crashes if I change one of only three things it asks during setup. My confidence is not super high right now.”
No offense, but to me, the way it written, it shines bad light rather on you. Obviously rep wouldn't answer you something like:

"Well, it said it is beta, didn't it? The quality of the installer of a BETA hasn't anything to do with the quality of hypervisor itself. "

Replies

jiggawatts • 10/11/2024

It was a month from release and it’s a product that’s “even more critical than the OS kernel” for reliability and availability. A failed hypervisor can take out dozens of servers at once.

I also managed to crash or lock it up several times, I just mentioned the keyboard thing as an insane bug. What possible dependency could a stripped down kernel with hardly any user space have on a keyboard layout that’s identical! It is different from en-US in name only.

It’s not about the specifics of the issue, but about the overall impression of sloppiness. They didn’t make a hypervisor that’s purpose-designed for the requirements, they just stripped down Windows and deleted stuff haphazardly so that they were missing the keyboard but still had the installer option.

For reference, I did run it at scale a few years later and my misgivings were confirmed… and then some. It was much less stable than ESXi and the cluster operations were a disaster. Read only operations could cause deadlocks that only a full cluster reboot could resolve. In-place upgrades weren’t available for several major versions! Meanwhile ESXi clusters could be live-upgraded including disk format changes!

After enough decades of experience you get a sixth sense for these things. A single sentence or just one word can trigger an alarm bell in your brain.

kelnos • 10/12/2024

With a beta, I expect it to at least be somewhat tested. If they didn't test with anything but the defaults in the installer, I wouldn't be particularly confident about the product either.