Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime-time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises' first experiences with Xen.

Novell has baked Xen into its current SLES 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) product, which shipped last month. Red Hat is including it in its upcoming RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) release slated to ship late this year or early 2007.

"What makes us most nervous is putting a bad taste in someone's mouth around the Xen technology, which we think is business transforming. We should not screw this thing up and put a cloud around Xen," Stevens told eWEEK Aug. 16 in an interview.

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