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...and then inside the DomU's you can have any OS you want...

Theoretically. As a matter of reduction to practice, if you don't make all those DomU's with EXACTLY the matching level of Xen kernel as the dom0, everything will fall through your fingers. Xen is really over hyped right now. The 64 bit stuff is flakely, live migration is flakey, hardware support is weak, the whole thing is still quite clearly in a beta state. Just peruse the list archives at http://lists.xensource.com/ to get an idea of what ordinary deployers of xen are routinely facing. Kernel panics are hardly unusual. In off the shelf SLES10, I can routinely crash dom0 (and by implication ALL guests) by simply issuing a migrate at the wrong time. Xen is still very young.

You will be right a year from now. The trend is clear. Not today, though.

C//

Perhaps the inclusion of TPM in later OSes, chipsets and hard-drives will spur adoption of Linux (which presumably would just not enable such garbage).

Actually, most work on the TPM is being done on Linux. See Trousers, Trusted Grub, TPM Device Driver, Enforcer, OSLO, etc. Not to mention that open-source Xen supports virtualizing the TPM and is aiming at TPM-based trusted boot functionality.

Not only not disruptive, but not new. What amazes me is how they wrote about virtualization without mentioning Xen or VMware.

The best resource I know of is http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HVM_Compatible_P rocessors

Xen
VMWare
linux-vserver
UML
OpenVZ
Plex86
Qemu
Bochs
lhype

and now

KVM

http://linuxvirtualization.com/ has some good linux to recent announcements regarding virtualisation software on Linux.

Are there any more?

simultaneously open multiple O/S's at the same time in a non-virtualized environment

If by "non-virtualized", you mean paravirtualizaed, then I'd recommend you take a look at the Xen demo CDs. Outside that, I'm not sure what you mean. What is Apple already doing?

Evidently, Xen, the open source Virtual Machine Monitor, has done it too. Look here for more details on Xen's trademark policy. Extremely close to what Firefox is doing now.

The article is talking about Xen not Zen. Oh and Novell has put a good deal of work into fixing the initial launch issues with Zen on both OpenSUSE 10.1 and SLES/D 10.

If you haven't you may want to update (assuming your system is functioning with updates enough to do so).

Xensource is a business just like vmware. A part of their product portofolio is opensource, but their cooperation with MS shows they are not afraid of closed source. And just because it is open source it is not by definion good, because you will still need their support to active keep developing xen as new OS and hardware that needs to be virtilized keeps ermerging.

They both offer free (as in beer)and paid/supported products so i cannot see vmware or xensource is more evil than an other. I have no clue what the difference to the linux kernel are and what the pro-cons of the different solutions are, and i bet they are also not clear yet to the kernel devs as well.

VMWare has a business to protect. XenSource does not.

Ahem... "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(TM) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology. [...] XenSource is backed by leading venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sevin Rosen Funds, Accel Partners, and New Enterprise Associates."

Perfect software? Thats a joke right? Check out their bugs that seem to never close:
http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi ?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_st atus=__open__&product=Xen&content=

XenSource certainly wanted to give a warm fuzzy to Microsoft, and bend over and take anything MS would give them:
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;16908928 92;fp;2;fpid;1
http://www.xensource.com/partners/microsoft_resour ces.html

XenSource will not work with VMware on standards, since XenSource is in the backpocket of Microsoft. Easy as that.

XenSource is not Open Source. It is out for money and nothing more, like all Corporations

Perfect software? Thats a joke right? Check out their bugs that seem to never close:
http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/buglist.cgi ?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_st atus=__open__&product=Xen&content=

XenSource certainly wanted to give a warm fuzzy to Microsoft, and bend over and take anything MS would give them:
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;16908928 92;fp;2;fpid;1
http://www.xensource.com/partners/microsoft_resour ces.html

XenSource will not work with VMware on standards, since XenSource is in the backpocket of Microsoft. Easy as that.

XenSource is not Open Source. It is out for money and nothing more, like all Corporations

1.5. Does Xen run on laptops?

Xen will typically run on laptops, but there's currently no support for APM or ACPI, hence you'll experience reduced battery life and no suspend/resume. We hope to add ACPI support in the future, exploiting Linux's existing support.

No, you're wrong. We have W2k3 running inside a Xen-enabled FC5 kernel. Try the instructions at http://www.xensource.com/files/xen_install_windows .pdf.

That's one of the major reasons why VT hardware support is so exciting.

The FAQ on the XenSource site make it pretty clear that the result of this partnership will be a commercial product. Specifically, one that does hypercall translation from the Xen ABI to the Microsoft Hypervisor ABI.

The Xen ABI is based on a "hypercall page". This is essentially a table of function stubs. The default hypercall page just does hypercalls for each stub. I presume that XenSource is building a special plugin for the Windows hypervisor that offers a Xen hypercall page to the guest. That page would do hypercall translation to the Microsoft Hypervisor ABI. This would require the ability to write a plugin the the Microsoft hypervisor (hence the cooperation) but it pretty much independent of Xen.

Of course, this leads to an interesting question. Since the hypervisor page runs in the same ring (and address space) as the Linux kernel, wouldn't it have to be GPL'd? Certainly, if you agree that binary modules violate the GPL, this can be viewed as nothing but a special purpose kernel module (and therefore a GPL violation).

It's smart that Microsoft is partnering here to limit it's own legal liability.

FWIW, I am not a lawyer and am purely speculating based only on the publicly available information on the XenSource site.

The FAQ on the XenSource site make it pretty clear that the result of this partnership will be a commercial product. Specifically, one that does hypercall translation from the Xen ABI to the Microsoft Hypervisor ABI.

The Xen ABI is based on a "hypercall page". This is essentially a table of function stubs. The default hypercall page just does hypercalls for each stub. I presume that XenSource is building a special plugin for the Windows hypervisor that offers a Xen hypercall page to the guest. That page would do hypercall translation to the Microsoft Hypervisor ABI. This would require the ability to write a plugin the the Microsoft hypervisor (hence the cooperation) but it pretty much independent of Xen.

Of course, this leads to an interesting question. Since the hypervisor page runs in the same ring (and address space) as the Linux kernel, wouldn't it have to be GPL'd? Certainly, if you agree that binary modules violate the GPL, this can be viewed as nothing but a special purpose kernel module (and therefore a GPL violation).

It's smart that Microsoft is partnering here to limit it's own legal liability.

FWIW, I am not a lawyer and am purely speculating based only on the publicly available information on the XenSource site.

If what you're saying is true, then either this guy is lying, or Windows 2003 has Xen support built in.

So I think you're wrong.

  -Sarkoon

The link you provide is to a download page for a Xen demo cd. The link you meant to provide is here:

http://www.xensource.com/files/xen_install_windows .pdf

Also from Xen FAQ, "Xen runs unmodified guests such as Windows, on "the bare metal" at native processor speed on Intel VT enabled hardware.". See answer to Question "How does Xen differ from other virtualization technologies?

From the creator of Xen's website "A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licence restrictions"

The only thing standing in the way of Xen's running Microsoft's products is Microsoft.

Not even that is standing in the way of Xen running M$ operating systems anymore, if you have the right hardware.

Taken from the Xen FAQ :

1.4. Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?
The paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However Xen 3.0 added Intel VT-x support to enable the running of unmodified guest operating systems, including Windows XP & 2003 Server, using hardware virtualization technology. We are working on implementing support for the equivalent AMD Pacifica technology.

There's a pdf on the Xensource website with information on how to install Windows Server 2003 right now. You do need a VT enabled Intel or AMD-V system though:

xensource

I've spent 10 hours over the last two days trying to get Windows XP working on Xen. I bought all the right hardware, followed all the right instructions, and hit a wall. I've found other people with the same problem (e.g. http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users /2006-06/msg00452.html) and some of them got around it... others didn't.

I've tried IRC, I've read the docs, I've even rebuilt the FC5 kernel RPMs with some patches, but nothing works.

Wake me when virtualisation on Linux is as simple as it is on OS X with Parallels. I should have saved the money I spent on the chip and the board for a new Intel Mac :(

you should be a little more up to date :

look at : http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/SuSeSLES10withWi ndows2003

"Don't you think I did?"

No I don't think you did at all. Right there under the products is their product which is called xen enterprise. Here is the link. http://www.xensource.com/products/xen_enterprise/i ndex.html. Right there the third bullet point (right after support) is windows support.

"Sorry, to be a competitor to VMWare or VirtualPC it has to run a *lot* more operating systems than that. Hell, even FreeBSD would be a start. But as I said without Windows support it's in no way a competitor and never will be."

Now that we know that statement was based on ignorance will you admit that xen is a competitor to VMware?

Xen cannot run Windows

To be sure, it doesn't work well yet. But its a far sight from "we can't prove it or tell you how to do it." If Xen development continues at the rate it has been going, its only another six months or so away before its reliable. Maybe less. Xen is very much a contender for this.

The initial claim.

There are people who talk about this.

You can also find support issues concerning the topic in Xen related devel newsgroups.

"No one cares about Xen. Microsoft made a copy of VPC free to drum up business for a product they just bought. "

What a bunch of crock. MS bought a company that was selling a product and making money on it. Xen directly caused VMware to start giving away one of the products which in turn made it impossible for Ms to recover it's investment in the company they bought.

"You still need to have a valid licence to run Windows on it or VMWare. "

Except that they just announced that you don't need to for the first four VMs.

"Where are you going to get support for Xen from?"

http://www.xensource.com/

"Does Xen even come close to providing what VMWare workstation or ESX can do?"

Yes it does. Some people even claim it's better then Vmware workstation and ESX.

"People are only running scared from OSS in the minds of many Slashdot users and bloggers no one cares about."

Right that's why MS executives fly all over the world trying their damndest to stop countries and corporations from switching.

Sorry dude even MS now admits they are worried. You need to get your big book of astro turfing updated.

Oh and to the guy said you can't run windows in Xen see the xensource.com web site.

"I cannot think of any other OS that even approaches the maturity of Linux at this point."

IBM might just decide to knock the dust off OS/2. In many ways Linux and Windows and yes even OSX still have not caught up with where it was a decade ago. I don't know of a 64 bit kernel for it or its offspring eCS but it might be hiding in one of the IBM labs in Boca Raton.

Actually the advances in hardware, emulators and virtualizers are making real time simulation of an entire hardware platform API or a specific OS API more practical. I suspect that any posix compliant OS with well written emulators or virtulizers will soon make reduce a specific OS like Windows to application level importance anyway.

I realize that most here are aware of these efforts, but are some urls anyway for the few that are not.

http://www.xensource.com/
http://www.parallels.com/
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/about/virtua lization/about/systems.html
http://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/pc.shtml
http://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh. shtml
http://www.winehq.com/

Matthew

Nice advertisement for VMWare, but Xen destroies VMWare in every benchmark I've yet seen. I understand they are taking different approaches, but with new CPUs supporting Intel's VT VMWare's OS advantage suddenly disappers. It should be a huge red flashing sign since VMWare's license doesn't allow benchmarks to be published. This page shows VMWare can compete in some places, but is pathetic in others. I don't know what makes them claim ESX server so much better than Xen, maybe they are trying to say VMWare is more stable? Because from my testing, Xen puts VMWare in the dust.

The host you mentioned doesn't provide the user with root access to their VPS. Plus, at that price point they're clearly chroot solutions.

Other hosts like these provide Xen VPS hosting which gives full root access and more hardware resources. They can reboot their virtual server and install their own kernels and kernel modules. With any decent provider, users get provisioned their own partitions on top of an LVM volume group.

Pretty much anything claming to be a VPS under the $14.95-$19.95 price point will be a chroot solution. You're lumped onto a big partition with everything else, you have shared memory allowing for abuse, you can't reboot your "machine", and some providers still won't give you root!

This isn't to say that a chroot solution might not be right for you, but it is not without its limitations. For someone looking for "just as good as the real thing, but cheaper", they will want Xen. If you're just looking for something more flexible than standard hosting plans, a chroot VPS (with root access) *may* do the trick.

What Microsoft's products are missing is support for the latest-and-greatest hardware-supported virtualization systems. Both Intel and AMD have (incompatible, competing) technologies in their latest CPUs which allow a lot of the grunt work for virtualization to be done in hardware rather than by emulating devices. The open source virtualization product Xen can make use of this through its hypervisor.

Microsoft is currently working on its own hypervisor-based product, but I seem to remember that they are tying it to Longhorn since the hypervisor is being co-developed with the Windows kernel team; I think they're planning to also use it as part of the DRM subsystem or something. Vista keeps getting pushed back, so the virtualization product does too.

From TFA:
>>>>>
  Novell is investing lots of effort in optimizing Xen specifically for running a virtualized copy of NetWare on top of Linux. The company's goal is to provide its customers with a migration path over to the Linux platform without giving up NetWare.
>>>>>

One of the many un-sung uses for Xen is a swiss army SAN. I'm glad to see someone touch on this.

>>>>>
If you want to use Linux as your host OS, you'll definitely have to go with VMware.
>>>>>

That wasn't so cool. I appreciate the fact that there are just too many products available to touch on everything in one short summary article / writeup, and while the majority of the article was informative even to the lay person, you need to end a sentence like that with a 'Because .... [summary]'. That's a really broad and sweeping statement to make.

Or perhaps even "I recommend VMWare" would have been better.

It looks like the author lost interest in what they were writing near the end of the article. They talk about IRC or newsgroups being the only support options available for OS products [another sweeping statement], however have you checked out the wiki at xensource.com lately?

Just seems like TFA lost coherency after 'What's best?' It went from really informative to misleading rather quickly. If your going to go to a virtualized platform you owe it to yourself to spend a month trying each candidate to see what works best for you, not the author of whatever article you read :) This is not a pro Xen rant but I'd like to point out that it does install effortlessly on most Debian systems in under an hour, the TFA sort of indicated otherwise.

and is the first desktop virtualization product to support Intel VT/Vanderpool CPU "partitioning".

To put it simply (I don't know the more in-depth stuff off the top of my head) Xen won't run an unmodified x86 OS as a guest (DomU). Instead of actually emulating the physical devices it provides ways for the guest OSes to request services from it through specialized "drivers", for one thing. Once the kernel/driver work is done, however, the fact that you're running under Xen does not affect your userspace apps.

So you can only run operating systems that have been modified to run under Xen. So far Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Plan9 have undergone modification, at least according to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/OSCompatibility

Intel® Virtualization Technology The Intel® Core(TM) Duo Processor includes support for Intel® Virtualization Technology which is a set of hardware enhancements to Intel server and client systems that combined with the appropriate software, will enable enhanced virtualization robustness and performance for both enterprise and consumer uses. Intel Virtualization Technology forms the foundation of Intel technologies focused on improved virtualization, safer computing, and system stability. For client systems, Intel Virtualization Technology's hardware-based isolation helps provide the foundation for highly available and more secure client virtualization partitions.

Virtualize All Operating Systems with Support for Intel® VT Hardware Virtualization Xen 3.0 is the industry's first virtualization infrastructure software to support Intel Virtualzation Technology (VT), which allows virtualized servers to run natively on the processor. This enables the hypervisor to exploit hardware acceleration for CPU and memory virtualization and is key to Xen's ability to virtualize all operating systems.

Xen has caused major shifts in business direction for commercial virtualisation companies: VMWare suddenly released their VMWare player in part as an effort to make their "virtual machine file format" the standard one. Look they even want to support virtualisation standards now! SWSoft kicked off OpenVZ for similar motivation: because Xen is a competing solution and (they gamble) that it is going to be better to give away a corresponding part of their "crown jewels" to get more of a market share.

Getting your virtualiser into the kernel (or a vendor tree) isn't about control, it's about being in technical pole position to sell copies of their commercial products. Xen might be free, and might have started this all off, but they too have a commercial arm, XenSource, trying to sell Xen Optimizer, presumably as a coda to other products. SWSoft have Plesk, HSPComplete, PEM and others. And VMWare has ESX/GSX server. All of their selling would be made easier, and their marketing departments made very happy, if the king of open source projects, Linux, includes parts of their core technology.

While I'm not sure what the critiera are for acceptance into the kernel, I don't think it's going to happen for SWSoft. From an engineering standpoint, their technology is not much different from Linux vserver which has been around a while to do much the same job and I imagine its invasive kernel changes to keep everything partitioned are just as (un)appealing to kernel maintainers. On the other hand the Xen kernel changes implement a new "architecture", albeit a virtual one, and (last I looked) were only around 150K in size. So I would have thought that the Xen guys have more of a shot at this one because the bulk of their software is maintained outside of the Linux kernel, and seems like the better solution from an engineering standpoint.

But with CPU virtualisation extensions becoming all the rage this year, I think it'll be a while before the best solution shakes itself out engineering-wise: there is still too much vendor "buy-in" for any of these solutions to seem like a good bet for the mainline kernel.

Also NB from the article that SWSoft have made lots of money from selling a modified Linux kernel, and yes for years before OpenVZ they would give out the sources to Virtuozzo licensees. It's not clear to me whether Virtuozzo uses a forked OpenVZ codebase and they are continuing to develop virtuozzo's kernel bits in secret (which would seem like madness on top of running openvz, but that's commerce for you :) ).

Yes, you need an EFI-capable operating system.

However, keep in mind that these systems are Vanderpool enabled. The intel core duo processor has VT (vanderpool features).

What does this mean?

Side by side independant OS virtualization utilizing Xen. Including Windows.

http://www.xensource.com/news/pr030105.html

At a minimum, you can have EFI Linux and EFI OS X running side by side.
Then you can run XP or Vista or DOS or Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in Qemu or VMware or whatever on Linux, or on Virtual PC on OS X.

According to the Xen mailing list, the first Core Duos have VT disabled:

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users /2006-01/msg00448.html.

So no Xen on the first MacTels (probably).

From the FAQ:

1.4. Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?

Unfortunately we do not currently support Windows; the paravirtualized approach we use to get such high performance has not been usable directly for Windows to date. However recently announced hardware support from Intel and AMD will allow us to transparently support Windows XP & 2003 Server in the near future. We are working on this and intend to have support available by the time the new processors are available.

Duo is that new processor.

VT and Xen 3.0 will
  virtualize Windows XP...
From PR:
The demonstration features a pre-release version of Xen 3.0 virtualizing both Linux and Microsoft Windows XP SP2. Support for unmodified guests, such as Windows, is made possible by Intel's VT technology, which provides a privileged mode of execution that allows Xen to share platform resources between both modified and unmodified guest operating systems, providing CPU, memory and I/O resource guarantees.

New 3.0Ghz Pen4 has VT and Yonah being part of the 65nm tech... also has virtualization.

Calm down, dude. Stateless Linux and Xen are the actual names of projects included in Fedora Core. They are not buzzwords or marketspeak. "Open source server virtualization software" was slightly redundant, but it is also a plain English description of Xen, which is exactly what you're asking for.

Any free OS that can be a Xen guest is okay in my books. Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Plan9... All good stuff.

Dude, do what I'm doing, and wait for the new CPUs from Intel or AMD. Xen WILL run Windows unmodified on these new chips once they're available, AND will execute slightly faster than VMware currently does (eg. like 95% of normal speed). See here for the Intel/AMD info. Or buy one of the Intel Macs once they're available, they're rumored to also use the Intel VT chips.

• AMD technotes about pacifica virtualixation
  
• AMD64 Architecture Tech Docs (pacifica PDF on top)
  

You haven't been paying attention. Xen will soon be able to run any build of pretty much anything on new "VT-enabled" hardware from intel. http://www.xensource.com/news/pr082305.html

I believe that xen/x86_64 is work in progress (Xen FAQ). Give Novel some slack here ... The real question is how well Xen/Novel works on suse/ia32. I really like xen, the only problem is that it takes quite a while to setup right.

Within the next, say 12 months we should have a 3rd choice: Running windows alongside linux via Xen on a dual-processor machine (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq#head-fcb 85a149da66907086cc8ba4f0793ad01769b92).

Section 1.3 and 1.4 of the FAQ seem to indicate Xen does not support Windows.

FAQ: Xen FAQ

Perhaps it's out of date?

Me too....

For those not in the know, Xen plus Intel's Vanderpool (or AMD's Pacifica) will allow you to get VMWare-like capabilities at near native speeds included into every Linux kernel.

http://www.answers.com/topic/xen
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel /2005-02/msg00651.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1055

... because we make the "copy" better, more secure and add more features all while adhereing to open, published standards.

Take http://www.spreadfirefox.com/, which is the Firefox webbrowser, for example. This piece of software is hardly new in the sense of being first of its kind, and yes it "copies" the same basic functionality that IE does (and IE copies from Mosaic - check out help->About Internet Explorer, it says clearly "Based on NCSA Mosaic."), but just because someone else invented the wheel doesn't mean we can't use it or make our own, or a better one.

And don't get me started on innovation. As a matter of fact FOSS has already beaten the mighty M$ to a better desktop search (Beagel http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/ vs. WinFS - though I will admit I can't quite predict what WinFS will be like IF it ever gets released or if the 2 are even comparable).

Oh, and we are creating new virtual machine architectures[VMA] (XEN http://www.xensource.com/ for example? Again, not sure if that is what you meant with VMA) and new visual interfaces (check out http://cairographics.org/introduction/ for Cairo, which may beat M$ again to the finish-line).

And while M$ buys 90% of the time the technology or licenses it, FOSS actually does develop their stuf from scratch.

Rehashing what's been done before and then claim we do not have freedom to do what we want to do. Interesting. I am not quite sure where these 2 opinions intersect to make sense. Please explain yourself further ...

All in all I think you are way of mark, Microsoft-Fanboy!