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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."
You can choose to believe the hype or not, as you wish, but I'm using Xen in my production environment, and it's simply fantastic. I've got friends with companies who are doing it as well, and it really changes how you think about administration.
Of course, there are some learning curves. For example, how you manage 3-7 servers is completely different from how you manage 20-30, even if they are all virtual. There's a lot more emphasis on system images, isolating functionality, reproducing configurations. On the other hand, dev environments are so much easier to build-up and tear down.
I just wish the OpenBSD port was in a usable state. The mercurial servers hosting it are often down, and even when they're up, I haven't been able to get a working kernel compiled from the sources (even after doing some of my own bugfixes). And last I saw on the Xen lists, Christoph Egger (the guy doing the OpenBSD port) submitted a security patch related to stack slamming, and the Xen guys were kind of like, "meh, security's not really a priority..."... Oh well, here's to keeping my fingers crossed