RHEL 5 Is on Its Way; Is Your Provisioning System Ready?

I've been reading up on RHEL5. Beta 2 came out last Friday; it includes Xen. Official release is planned for early 2007, and most hosting providers won't support it immediately. Still, (assuming you don't already have answers) now might be the time to start thinking about how it'll impact your provisioning, support and license tracking systems.

Xen lets multiple operating systems run on the same server. In this interview, Red Hat senior product management director Scott Crenshal says you will be able to install RHEL5 on "a certain number" of virtual environments for free. Within a web hosting environment, this raises some interesting questions:

1. Many data centers offer automated OS installs on physical servers - but what if a customer wanted to run FreeBSD, Debian and RHEL5 within three separate Xen instances on the same box?

2. Until now, shared hosting resellers have had to choose which control panel to run on each server. With RHEL5, they could offer cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, HSphere, Webmin... simultaneously. But does your license management database have the ability to track such combinations?

3. How would a customer submit support requests for cPanel errors, let's say, on one of many Xen instances on his server? Should there be separate IDs for each virtual environment within your ticketing system? In addition, your support team would have to be relatively up to speed on Xen.

4. I was telling my friend Jeff Huckaby over at RackAid that it'd be cool for developers to run separate web/app/db virtual servers on the same machine and move them out to separate physical servers as their sites grow. Of course, they'd want to maintain each Xen instance's IP address throughout the migration. Does your network architecture support beyond-the-box IP portability?

5. Back in June, Gartner predicted that 40% of mid-size businesses will use server virtualization technology by 2007. RHEL5 will no doubt expedite adoption. Unfortunately, according to Gartner, virtualization will cause companies to use 20% fewer servers. Will you make up any impact this might have by reaching out to a larger number of customers? Offering more value added services?