Desperately Seeking Xen

AlexGr sends us to an excellent article on the state of Xen by Jeff Gould (Peerstone Research). He concludes that the virtualization technology has some maturing to do and will face increasing competition for the privilege of taking on VMWare. Quoting: "What's going on with Xen, the open source hypervisor that was supposed to give VMware a run for its money? I can't remember how many IT trade press articles, blog posts and vendor white papers I've read about Xen in the last few years... The vast majority of those articles — including a few I've written myself — take it as an article of faith that Xen's paravirtualizing technical approach and open source business model are inherently superior to the closed source alternatives from VMware or Microsoft."

Comments

Re:vm ware

[Per Wigren]

If you want to run multiple linux instances on the cheap then xen is the way to go at the moment. Except that OpenVZ is a better way to go in that case. If you are only going to run multiple instances of Linux, with OpenVZ you don't need to preallocate a fixed amount of memory for each VM, the root filesystem can be a subdirectory of the root OS instance's filesystem, among many other things. It can do just about everything that XEN can do, including live migration to other physical nodes.

Xen (and virtualization) is for the Enterprise

[xzvf]

While it might be nice if all these things are easy and work well for the hobby crowd, the real money in virtualization is in the enterprise space. Most servers in enterprise environments run 15% max and are refreshed every 3-5 years. The special processor matters less in that case, and the competition is between a mature VMWareESX server (not free), a hardware based IBM and Xen. Microsoft is a surprisingly minior player. VMWareESX server is very good for x86 consolidation and saves customers money, but is very expensive. It is still the best option for Intel based consolidation. Xen has deep penatration in enterprise lab environments. It is just getting the enterprise management tools to move into real production. IBM is very good at virtualization and stability, but on proprietary power and mainframe hardware. Xen will be fine, because the market is very immature, but expect more seamless and non-attrusive virtualization on the desktop.

Xen's Maturity

[Krondor]

He concludes that the virtualization technology has some maturing to do...

I RTFA and it says very little about the maturity of the actual Xen technology. The article is more a point about several non-related factors;

1.) There is a lack of pretty management interfaces.

True, but these are in the works from Red Hat, Novell, XenSource, and various other ends. Already some of them look pretty promising, but if you are a real admin you don't need them in the first place. There is nothing wrong with using the command line tools to manage your Xen virtual guest environment.

2.) There is a lack of references for companies using Xen.

How does this relate to the viability of the Xen virtualization? Yeah it makes management feel nice and fuzzy that others are using something, but this does not relate to how well the Xen technology performs. I also suspect that like many open source projects, there are many people using it that do not report it. Novell has personally contacted me and my company to ask us to assist in their new paravirtualized Windows drivers initiative and then be a reference for the technology. It seems that at least some companies are moving to address this, at any rate.

3.) There aren't many benchmarks about Xen versus VMWare.

VMWare does not allow benchmarks they do not approve of. It's in that draconian EULA you agreed to by using it.

4.) It's awkward to paravirtualize Windows.

Yes, it is. Novell signed the soul sapping agreement with MS and as such is pushing some paravirtualized drivers for Windows. The article continually talks about woes with Xen on Red Hat. Red Hat didn't sign the agreement and will require some much more intelligent coding to make this happen. It might never happen, so for Windows it's full virtualization with VT (or AMD's equivalent) or bust. Sorry, use SUSE for it or use full virtualization. It's an MS issue not a Xen issue.

5.) MS's new Viridan Virtualization Platform is using paravirtualization as well.

Yep, that should be a testament to the approach versus VMWare. Though it is interesting that VMWare now has a Linux kernel virtualization implementation similar to KVM. It seems VMWare is headed to paravirtualization as well. Obviously Xen did something right.

6.) There is a lot of competition.

True. How again is this relating to Xen as a virtualization technology.

Again, I'm not saying Xen is perfect. It definitely has issues and room to grow. I'm just saying that the article makes little, if any, relevant points to Xen's virtualization technology.

Data Center USA

[fyoder]

I stopped reading the article with this quote:

Oh my. Editable XML configuration files, obscure command line interfaces, grayed out options in the GUI? Thanks, but no thanks. This thing doesn't sound like it's ready for prime time in Data Center USA.

Are sysadmins at "Data Center USA" morons? "Oh nooo, command line time, I hate that. Oh nooo, my option I want is all grayed out! Help me, help me! Oh I am so sad now."

Deploying vm stuff is not the same as using a word processor. "Data Center USA" is in real trouble if their sysadmins aren't any smarter than regular desktop users.