Following in the footsteps of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace has also had to reboot its servers in order to fix a major bug that was first identified in the Xen virtualization platform.

Rackspace informed customers about the “maintenance work” via an email, which has since been seen by various media organizations.

“Recently, an issue that has the potential to impact a portion of the Public Cloud environment was reported,” wrote Rackspace.

“Our engineers and developers continue to work closely with our vendors and partners to apply the solution to re-mediate this issue. While we believe in transparent communication, there are times when we must withhold certain details in order to protect you, our customers.”

Rackspace’s reboot comes just days after Amazon announced it would initiate a similar series of reboots of its EC2 instances, shortly after the bug came to its attention.

But while Amazon insists “less than 10%” of its instances need to be rebooted, Racksapce declared that all of its Standard, Performance 1 and Performance 2 servers would need restarting to eliminate the Xen bug. As a result, customers need to ready themselves, it warned.

“In preparation for these reboots, we recommend that you take proactive steps to ensure that your environment is configured to return to proper operations after a reboot,” reads Rackspace’s email.

Rackspace posted a note on its website, requesting that customers:

• Verify all necessary services (Apache, IIS, MySQL, etc.) are configured to start on server boot
• Ensure that you have up-to-date server images and file-level backups enabled, and confirm that you have backups of all critical data
• Confirm that any unsaved changes, such as firewall rules and application configurations, are indeed saved

All well and good, but Rackspace has been criticized for its slow response to the bug, certainly compared to Amazon. While Amazon’s first email went out last Wednesday, Rackspace didn’t begin to inform its customers until 9.20pm last Friday, when many IT people had already gone home for the weekend. As a result, it’s likely there are numerous customers who were unable to perform the necessary steps to ensure continuity.

Rackspace began its maintenance work on Sunday in the US, and plans to reboot servers in Europe and Australia on Monday and Tuesday, presuming everything goes off without a hitch.

“We will perform this maintenance one region at a time, and will not begin the maintenance for the next region until the maintenance for the previous region is complete,” said Rackspace. “We will communicate with you via email and our status page at least one hour before the maintenance begins and immediately once the maintenance is completed, per region.”

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