Citrix Announces Agreement to Acquire XenSource

An anonymous reader writes "'Citrix has signed a definitive agreement to acquire XenSource a leader in enterprise-grade virtual infrastructure solutions. The acquisition moves Citrix into adjacent and fast growing datacenter and desktop virtualization markets.' For nearly $500 million, including about $100 million of unvested options, Citrix would be purchasing VMWare's closest competitor in the server virtualization market, with XenEnterprise v4 offering technology similar to VMWare's flagship product — and arguably overtake them as a combined solution, as VMWare offers little in the realm of application and desktop virtualization. Though subject to the customary closing conditions, both boards of directors have approved the transaction, and the deal is expected to close in Q4 of 2007."

Comments

Xen not "closest competitor".

[Courageous]

Xen is, of course, not VMWare's "closest competitor". Microsoft has over 25% of the market with their Virtual Server product. After that, Virtuozzo has the next largest deployment.

C//

kvm

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain why the future of all virtualization isn't simply kvm?

kvm seems like the only free, general-purpose, straight forward sort of implementation.

Xen needs modified guests AFAIK, so Windows and others are out. VMware isn't free and has various issues because of that. kvm seems the obvious choice, although I understand it's still a work in progress.

Re:kvm

[pipatron]

KVM needs hardware support for virtualization. Xen is nice for us old folks with old computers.

Re:kvm

[tepples]

KVM needs hardware support for virtualization. Xen is nice for us old folks with old computers. Old computers tend to have old motherboards that support old RAM with old (that is, small) capacity. Old RAM capacity doesn't work for new virtualization, unless you're running even older operating systems and applications.

Re:kvm

[Wesley Felter]

Can someone explain why the future of all virtualization isn't simply kvm?

XenSource/Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, and Novell have invested millions in Xen, and for the sake of backwards compatibility they are now stuck with it.

Re:kvm

[gustaffo]

Xen doesn't need modified guests, I've tested multiple microsoft os's and linux distributions under it without modified gusts. It works. But, it requires hardware virtualization capability to run in HVM mode. Additionally, disk IO and network IO are terrible due to qemu's disk controller/network card emulation.

Re:kvm

[Richard W.M. Jones]

XenSource/Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, and Novell have invested millions in Xen, and for the sake of backwards compatibility they are now stuck with it.

You are wrong. Red Hat and others have invested in libvirt and all the virtualisation management tools they ship are based on libvirt. Libvirt supports Xen, QEMU and KVM, and will soon support OpenVZ too. There is also discussion about supporting VMWare.

Rich.

Re:kvm

[keeboo]

I'm ok with Xen paravirtualization.
It has such a low overhead you cannot compare to VMware/kvm full virtualization.
If you really want/need so, you can run full virtualization with Xen too (if you have the proper hardware extensions).

Now if you just want to toy with another OS, frankly, paravirtualization is not the most convenient way to do that. But if you're working with dozens of VMs distributed in a couple of servers, I think that paravirtualization is the way to go.

Re:kvm

[Wesley Felter]

I'll believe it when I see RHEL shipping with KVM. And unless they can run Xen VMs on KVM, RHEL will have to continue to include Xen to run old Xen VMs. Gotta love legacy code.

Re:kvm

[pipatron]

Dunno about that, I can run 6 instances of the latest Ubuntu Server with a bit of shoe-horning on my 512MB P3, and if I just wanted to run 2-3, it'd even be comfortable.

obligatory

[eneville]

... and I thought Citrix already did KVM ... and of course I'm referring to the keyb vid mouse kvm...

Good news for Enterprise Quality Virtualization?

[nickh01uk]

What do users of Xen's flagship product Xen Enterprise 4 think of the deal. Is this good news for the products future? Where do you see the business going WRT Citrix and integration over the next few years?
Nick.

Uhh...

[TheRealFixer]

VMware offers little in the realm of... desktop virtualization

Actually, no, not really. VMware has been doing quite a lot with VDI for a couple of years now. Really, they've pioneered it. It's Citrix that was trying to adapt and catch up in this field, as it threatened their traditional market. The purchase of XenSource goes a long way to help them compete in a market that VMware has been dominating.

In fact, I would go as far as saying that this purchase is primarily about Citrix keeping up with VMware in VDI.

Re:Uhh...

[TheRealFixer]

VDI is an overall [i]concept[/i] that VMware has been building with various third-party application vendors (including Citrix - though I'd imagine that's going to change now). VMware sells a VDI edition of VI3 licensing, but it's not required to actually do VDI. At the core, all you need is a virtualization platform, and a remote client to interact with the desktops. You can even do it with VMware server for free if you want.

What do you mean by "graphics"? Are you talking about 3D games, or full motion video? If so, Citrix is not any better at this than VDI. If you're just talking about GUI applications, then you really don't know what you're talking about here. In typical VDI installs, you're virtualizing Windows XP workstations and interacting with them through RDP (which was originally licensed from Citrix, ironically). In Citrix, you're accessing a Windows server over their own ICA protocol. Since RDP 5.1, there's not a whole lot of difference between ICA and RDP. I believe ICA still holds a bit of an edge in bandwidth utilization and efficiency, but not much anymore. Over a LAN, it's not even noticeable. Visual performance-wise, there's not really a difference between VDI and Citrix.

Re:Slashdot is only now reporting this?!

[russlar]

There've been stories on this up for a few days in the Firehose, but this is the first one to make the front page.

So... What does this mean for OSS?

[MrZaius]

What's Citrix's track record like with the open source community? I don't think I've ever stumbled across their name outside of pre-OpenSolaris Sun systems and Windows-only environments.

Re:So... What does this mean for OSS?

[larry bagina]

my buddy works at citrix. They use some linux boxes on their intranet, but they're not down with it. A cpuple days ago, we were out drinking and looking for tail. He's not a penguin, but he knows I am. He mentioned that Xen would be close sourced, but that was just his educated guess. If ESR or Bruce Perens can get the ear of the CxOs, maybe they'll keep it GPL.

Re:So... What does this mean for OSS?

[vertinox]

What's Citrix's track record like with the open source community?

For some reason I thought Citrix was bought out by Microsoft, but I forgot it was that Microsoft only bought the rights to Citrix Metaframe and came up with Terminal Server using that software. And then that had a spat over Windows NT itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrix#Microsoft_deal _and_early_relationship

Re:So... What does this mean for OSS?

[EvilRyry]

Xen uses Linux kernel code correct? Wouldn't this mean that at least the core of Xen would always need to remain GPL? I would suspect that Red Hat or Novell would step in to make sure that the surrounding tools and such remain up to date and usable under their current licenses.

You've been reading propaganda again

[postbigbang]

Microsoft's VS is the old Connectix stuff. It's ok, and changes when a new hypervisor becomes part of Windows Server 2008. They tend to focus on servers, because their heads are up in their behinds about using mulitple desktop OSes-- anything else but theirs.

Virtuozzo isn't a server VM, it's an app VM.

VMWare and Xen are a bit different. VMWare has lots of depth and maturity. Xen has nearly similar compatibility but has fewer API sets to work with it. Xen's app hosting capabililities are more astute and highly competitive with Microsoft's SoftGrid and Citrix's remote apps. That's why Citrix bought them.

Virtuozzo has roots in site hosting, and it's maturity with Apache also extends to OpenVZ.

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[Courageous]

Virtuozzo isn't a server VM, it's an app VM.

Terminology may be a bit vague here. But as I see it, Virtuozzo is not application virtualization, it's operating system virtualization, like Solaris Containers, or like the original mainframe virtualization that started this stuff off 30 years ago.

And p.s., you don't have to "read the propaganda," as you put it, to know who VMWare's biggest competitor is: just ask VMWare, and they will tell you clearly: Microsoft.

Xen is hardly a competitor at all in data center space at the moment, BTW. Redhat is actively recommending you don't use their virtualization product yet for production, and Xen Source is only expecting $8M or so in sales this year.

I mean, jeeze: Live Migration is provably unstable in every distribution of Xen out there, except perhaps for the 4.0 beta stuff. Methinks someone else might be "reading propaganda," as the expression goes...

C//

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[postbigbang]

We disagree: containers, sandboxes, and other single-OS-instance schemes are app VM; they don't reinstantiate the host OS. They may virtualize by re-instantiation many OS resources, multiple concurrent settings/processes/services/etc, but there's one OS, not multiple OS instances.

I would agree that Microsoft is VMWare's biggest competitor. Big guns. Connectix stuff is well matured and reincarnated, and Microsoft Systems Center VMM might be more than its other disconnected dirt at some point.

But your knowledge of Xen will be changed even now, if you go to their website, look at XenEnterprise V4, and get to understand how their paravirtualization components have been changed. You don't see Xen in data centers.....yet. But like VMWare, Xen's used in a lot of labs, developer pits, skunk works, underneath Virtual Iron, and so on. Presentation virtualization is a big reason why Citrix bought Xen-- there's going to be a fierce war over sending just presentation data as pipes get clogged with too many thick clients-- browser apps and multimedia that chews up wire space.

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[Courageous]

But your knowledge of Xen will be changed even now, if you go to their website, look at XenEnterprise V4, and get to understand how their paravirtualization components have been changed. You don't see Xen in data centers.....yet. But like VMWare, Xen's used in a lot of labs, developer pits, skunk works, underneath Virtual Iron, and so on.

I run one of those labs. We have a virtual data center prototyping lab with $1M in equipment and > 200 virtual machines of various different stripes. Xen is promising, quite promising, but it's not "data center ready yet," from a functional point of view, from a reliability point of view, from a hardware compatibility point of view, ... generally it is at a poor Technical Readiness Level at the moment.

My OP in this thread was objecting to Xen being VMWare's biggest competitor: they're not. At a guess, Xen has a year or two to go before it can be seriously considered for production, high availability data centers.

Could they be VMWare's biggest competitor one day? Different question. However, I tired a long time ago of futuristic technomancy, and tend to focus on things on my near term horizon. The tech biz is rife with hype, as I am sure you know, including Xen, which has been seriously overhyped lately.

Whatever else is true, the industry developments are fun to watch.

C//

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[max cohen]

Redhat is actively recommending you don't use their virtualization product yet for production

They are?! That's not the signals I'm seeing from Red Hat. The Virtualization capability of RHEL5 is plastered all over their website and our sales/engineering reps have yet to say hold back on rolling it out.

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[Courageous]

They are?!

They are. They are saying wait for update 1, and saying it in public, at their conferences.

There are features in the RHEL5 hypervisor that, when invoked, can cause any varieties of bad behavior, up to and including the crashing of the hypervisor and the catastrophic loss of all virtual machines hosted by it. Amongst other things.

This situation isn't a surprise to anyone who knows Xen very well. Redhat took the open source Xen, including features in that open source release that the Xen Source authors expressly stated as not being "fully baked yet" (quote), integrated those features into RHEL5, and called them "ready". The result has been an embarassing and highly visible misexecution of their virtualization strategy; that's why they've been turning the volume down a notch and attempting to slow the hype machine.

They're going through a lick the wounds cycle at the moment... attempt to repair the problem. This is one of the reasons that they have KVM as "plan B".

C//

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[Courageous]

BTW,

We do have a terminology issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system-leve l_virtualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualiz ation

Mind you, one might or might not consider wikipedia authoritative. I've seen OS virtualization most often used as described therein, but the term "app virtualization" I've found to be much murkier.

C//

Re:You've been reading propaganda again

[postbigbang]

There's a problem with semantics and terminology, depending whether you're a marketing person or the one that has to make things work. It's a typical problem.

Containers, sandboxes, and the like are operating system resources virtualization. Some have a greater degree of apparent instance autonomy than others.

Paravirtualized systems link a paravirtualized host OS with subsequent guest instances.

Direct translating systems are actually microkernels, sometimes loaded after a host OS instance that's replaced by the hypervisor or augments it (ESX is like the former).

Presentation virtualization is just remote access to an application or OS instance with a fancy name.

XEN Foundation

[decriptor]

This is really interesting. I'm not sure where this is going to take XEN, but they are talking about a XEN foundation. Maybe this will prove to be a really good move for everyone. Community, businesses, and customers(not just xensource customers).

"Creating the Xen Foundation allows for even greater transparency and leadership independence than we have today, and will provide an organized forum for enabling the community of vendors and users that are building Xen into their businesses to influence the project roadmap," Pratt said.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3 694721

If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[mikaelhg]

Not so much reading propaganda than using the actual products.

We mostly use VMware ESX, which is really directed to IT departments. All of the tools assume central control. They work extremely well and reliably, as long as you're willing to stick with the centrally managed model. We've been using VMware Server on our development workstations to develop and test applications with specific images.

I've been using Amazon EC2, which is a Xen-based value-adding product, for external software testing and random one-off hosting. I've installed Xen with CentOS 5 and FC6/7 on development servers and workstations, to try it out. The open source Xen tools are extremely rudimentary. The XenSource "enterprise" tools are basically copies of the VMware model, and mimic the centrally managed thing without doing it quite as well. However, the Xen API is very malleable towards a non-centrally-management tool model. By that I mean that you could very easily (and I'm doing just that on my copious free time) build a self-service server station for a IT department, to provide quick service to those internal customers who just need some commodity server space, right now, and for the right price.

Virtuozzo's story is basically over. With absolutely everybody in the underdog space choosing Xen, it's not likely they'll get much new business outside their narrow niche. It doesn't matter how neat your product is, if the product next door is completely acceptable, open to newcomers, free, and adopted by all of your other suppliers.

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[postbigbang]

I'm not so sure about Virtuozzo; its mgmt components are ok.

Microsoft's VS seems to give a comfort level to homogeneous Microsoft 'houses'. Yet we've also seen it run Fedora seamlessly....although you can't get reasonable instrumentation without going to other stuff.

VMWare is nice, sexy, red, lipstick, and costs a fortune.

Yet Xen, while far better than early releases (ugly), seems to peak many interests in our web racks... for cost. Slick, it is not. But Citrix specializes in 'slick' and so we expect there to be interesting changes.

Unless you don't use Windows at all (and I'm not saying anyone does), the Microsoft VS will migrate onto Xen soon, too. Who'll win the race? Performance, price, reliability, in reverse order.

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[mikaelhg]

I'm not so sure about Virtuozzo; its mgmt components are ok.

In the IT department space, the key questions are a) does it do the job and b) are you willing to bet heavily on that it'll be around in ten years?

I left out Microsoft Virtual Server because everyone knows that unless you push the Microsoft products to the very upper edge of your stack, you're screwed with your pants on. I have nothing personal against them, I just have to take care of my employer's interests in the IT field first.

I'll bet you 10 that strategic positioning will beat the pants off performance, price and reliability. If your OS providers (Linux providers, Sun) are going with Xen, and your application and hardware providers are partnering with your OS providers, it just makes sense to put all your eggs in the same basket, since the penalty for breaking one egg is pretty much the same as for breaking them all. Right?

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[Znork]

"But Citrix specializes in 'slick' and so we expect there to be interesting changes."

Of course, as Xen is opensource I expect the free software variants of xen management to grow at a fair pace (particularly fuelled by linux vendor interest).

Which rather begs the question; exactly what is Citrix paying $500M for, when they could use Xen for their own purposes anyway?

"Who'll win the race?"

Yeah, well, one thing's for sure; it wont be the stockholders in those companies at least. Virtualization may be a 'hot' segment, but it's rapidly getting extremely competetive. Paying inflated prices giving the web boom/crash a run for its money for companies in a sector that's already seen it's highest profit margins may not be a particularly bright long term investment.

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[postbigbang]

Xen is a checkmark for Citrix; remember that terminal services competes with all that Citrix tries to do.

Competition is fun.

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[clydemaxwell]

What the heck do you mean by terminal services? Terminal services are what Citrix provides...if by Windows 'Terminal Services', they are a prereq for installing citrix! Either way, I'm confused by what you mean.

Re:If by propaganda you mean using the products...

[Courageous]

Virtuozzo's story is basically over.

*shrug*

They had 127% revenue growth last year. One may therefore conclude that rumors of their pending death may be exaggerated... ... anyway, it is my opinion that you are being a bit myopic. It's not about the virtualization layer per se, but rather about the management of it that results in enterprise interest. For that, the commercial Virtuozzo product is quite slick.

C//

Re:Who uses Xen?

[Wesley Felter]

Those who use Xen for VPS hosting, how hard would it be to switch to ESX

Considering the price of ESX, it would be out-of-business hard to switch to it. Smart VPS hosts are using OpenVZ/Virtuozzo anyway.

Not a problem

[realdodgeman]

For all you skeptics out there: If this means that Xen is going closed source, we still have KVM. KVM is growing features faster than any other VM AFAIK. And if Xen stays open source, then all is good anyway.

Re:Not a problem

[GiMP]

For all you skeptics out there: If this means that Xen is going closed source, we still have KVM. KVM is growing features faster than any other VM AFAIK. And if Xen stays open source, then all is good anyway.

First of all, Xen is its own operating system, it does not depend on Linux -- as does KVM, which is a part of Linux. They're both free software, which is great, but Xen does offer one to run a 'dom0' on NetBSD or OpenSolaris. For the latter alone, I could see Sun keeping Xen going -- even if XenSource dropped updating the opensource branch. (Solaris has jails but this is *not* the same thing) IBM has also expressed interest in Xen, although their interests lie in Linux, so they may not be opposed to shifting to KVM.

Secondly... Xen is very well matured compared to KVM, which only in January added support for paravirtualization. Personally, I have tens of machines running Xen for my business and even on such a "small scale" and wouldn't even consider moving to KVM in its terribly immature and feature-poor state.

Finally... Many companies have already deployed Xen and developed their infracture around it (including developing automation routines, etc). I can see a least a handful able to dedicate some development resources. It might not be as great as having a company behind it, but it would be enough perhaps to keep it stable until something else (maybe KVM) catches up.

Re:Not a problem

[TheRaven64]

IBM has also expressed interest in Xen It's a little more than expressing interest. IBM did the PowerPC port of Xen, wrote a lot of the support for IOMMUs to Xen (and Linux), did a lot of the work with HVM, and hosted the last XenSummit.

More developers for VMware

[joe_n_bloe]

Actually, the brain drain from Xen to VMware will kick into high gear now that Xen employees have had the big payday they've been waiting for.

Re:More developers for VMware

[martyros]

This seems to presume that there's some compelling reason to leave Xen and go to VMWare. If that's the case, why didn't they just go to VMWare in the first place? They've been hiring...

Re:More developers for VMware

[joe_n_bloe]

This seems to presume that there's some compelling reason to leave Xen and go to VMWare. If that's the case, why didn't they just go to VMWare in the first place? They've been hiring...

And they've been hiring people from Xen.

I hate Citrix

[celardore]

A couple of years ago at work, the IT dept. changed all our 486s for terminals and a Citrix network. It was awful. The server and connection to said server were, and still are, buggy. Whereas before, if the network went down, we could still at least type a letter or work on a spreadsheet. Now if the network goes down (which is at least weekly) we're stuck with nothing to do. In an accounts department it is vital that we have Excel, Word, etc to do the most basic of tasks. Worst move ever.

On the plus side, I got to keep my 486 which I installed Linux on and now it runs pretty nicely.

Re:I hate Citrix

[twokay]

I work with a Citrix/Server 2003 based network at a school and there have never been any problems with the connection to the servers. This is with half the kids on flash game sites or streaming video from mtv.com (good fun can be had shadowing them while they are on game sites :p).

I would say that your problems are with the IT department being clueless, or someone skimped on hardware are the servers are loaded too heavily.

Re:I hate Citrix

[celardore]

For the most part I would say you are absolutely right. On the other side of the coin though, with CTRL+ALT+DEL then task manager then the 'users' tab, I can right click a name and "remote control" their session. I have access to the managers accounts. I don't do it though, because I like my job and want to keep it. I'm just saying Citrix is horrible for usability and security.

Re:I hate Citrix

[Bert64]

It's not citrix that's insecure, it's the basic design of windows that was always intended to be single user. Thus, a lot of design choices were made which may have seemed sensible in a single user system, but aren't suitable for a system where several users are going to be using it at once.

Re:I hate Citrix

[AI0867]

We used to have terminals with the option of either citrix or X. citrix was slower and locked down to the point where it was completely unusable. X was on (an old server running) RH9 with all homedirs on AFS.

Last year, citrix was replaced with powerfuse, which was somewhat better, but everything is on the way of being replaced with dual boot windows w/ roaming profiles and suse10.2 (with the same AFS).

Re:I hate Citrix

[Scrybe]

WOAH, I think the bigger indication here of a clueless user/admin population is that you are saying that you:
a) were using a 486 in production a couple years ago
b) still use one
How much RAM does that monster have, 32MB? Maybe a high speed VESA Local Bus "Accelerated" video card?

Of course if your network is going down weekly that is another indication of problems that should not occur with a modern network/provider. Splurge on a $30/mo DSL backup if you are a remote site.

Citrix is an excellent way to provide access to windows applications BUT you have to size the servers appropriately. This IS windows we are talking about.

Can't wait to try it out!

[tom581]

I work for a large financial company and we currently use citrix for remote access. We're using an RSA token at the citrix login, besides a regular password. Once connected, (via my firefox web-browser on OpenSuse 10.2 Linux, and yes, SuSE has the citrix plugins, even had an RPM in my old SuSE 9.2 Pro system), I can access my Lotus Notes, email , documents, and we have metaframe installed. I can open remote-host access from the citrix web and remote access a GUI desktop (xdm) on a Solaris gateway host, full X11. Preformance is reasonable, I'm running about 4Mb download speed over a comcast cable modem. In previous companies we always used remote ssh, some with the sshd configured for RSA token support. And that was fine for text based work. Unfortunately, not all 3rd party software provides good command line interface. This has forced us to use some form of remote X11 desktop access. I'm fairly pleased with the remote Citrix access. I'm anxious to see what Citrix is going to with Xen. I'm running Xen on redhat 5, and on OpenSuse 10.2. We're currently using vmware GSX server and workstation in the office. I'm very pleased with the command-line access of Xen, and the ease of which to configure and resize virtual disks and VM's. I can clone Xen VM's with a script, making a "one-button" clone, and automatically adjusting all the new clone system specifics', like VM nic mac address, hostname, etc. Could never do that on VMWare. Just imagine the possiblities if Citrix integrates Xen. You could have one-button VM creation, then disconnect, go home & reconnect and resume your work on the newly created VM, all thru a web-browser. Geeze, I wonder if they could come up with an iPhone plugin? ;-) An IT Administrator's DREAM!!!

Re:Can't wait to try it out!

[Bert64]

There is always NX (www.nomachine.com for a commercial version, free ones are available) which does much the same thing - accelerated X11.

Darn

[nurb432]

There goes the free version. Any other *enterprise ready* free options out there?

And the closest competitor to VMWare? While thats a nice gesture , i am pretty sure that Microsoft is currently #2 in the virtualization market.

Info on Xen's latest product

[billstewart]

I wrote one of those submissions :-) I mostly commented on the product rather than the buyout. Here you go:

"XenSource has been in the news twice this week -- Monday they release a product, then Tuesday they get bought for $500m by Citrix. Here's Network World's take on the buyout and on the product. It looks like the product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)

(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/081507-citri x-xensource-desktop-server-virtualization.html?nlh tspec=081507specialalert1&

What they're doing with the Free-Beer Version.

[billstewart]

It looks like the enterprise product is packaging new releases of several of their components -- there's a 64-bit hypervisor version 3.1 that uses the Intel and AMD hardware tricks, APIs, management tools, and XenMotion, which lets you move running virtual machines around. According to Xen's product page, the free-beer XenExpress version gets the hypervisor, APIs, and some of the management tools, but not the fancier management or XenMotion, and it's somewhat crippled in terms of capacity (max 4 VMs, 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, while the commercial versions support 128GB total RAM, larger VMs, and unlimited VMs and CPUs.)

(But will it run Linux?) It will run Linux -- one of the data sheets implies that Linux only runs in 32-bit mode, while Windows can run 64-bit. Perhaps there's more documentation that provides more details."

How free is it? I don't know; I haven't read the licenses, so I don't know if it's free-beer-only-closed-source or Fully Stallman Compliant (unlikely) or somewhere in between (probably.)

Re:What they're doing with the Free-Beer Version.

[Bert64]

Strange, i ran a 64bit linux instance under xen 3.x a while ago with no issues...

Re:What they're doing with the Free-Beer Version.

[TheRaven64]

Most of the non-Free components of XenEnterprise are Windows-specific. If you want paravirtualised Windows device drivers and Windows-based GUI management tools, go with the commercial version. According to Simon (CIO of XenSource), there's still a lot more money in virtualising Windows than Linux.

If they're smart, they'll be more open with Xen

[tji]

Xen has a lot of potential. The basic virtualization capabilities are on par with VMWare or anybody else.

What Xen _really_ blows at is usability / manageability. Setting up Xen is a pain in the ass, especially if you're on something other than 32bit x86. Figuring out obscure command line options and text config file syntax won't take them very far.

XenSource has a closed source, functionally limited GUI management tool in their free (as in beer) XenExpress. It makes managing Xen VMs more realistic, but the limitations are too severe (maximum of 4 VMs, missing some features).

If they want to compete with VMWare, and fend off KVM, they'll need a lot more traction. They only way they'll get it is to start building the user-base.

They need to open source their management tools, and make Xen as easy to use as VMWare. Maybe they need to hold back a few enterprise-grade features, so that they can still sell product at the high end. But, the common linux users, and low-end business users could still be enticed away from VMWare, to a more open solution, if it was available. If they continue their half-open approach, they even compete with themselves, in Xen on Ubuntu/Suse/RedHat.

If they don't open up, VMWare continues to dominate. Microsoft's upcoming hypervisor expands to the strong number 2 option, and other wildcards might crop up.. KVM with a good mgmnt too.

Re:If they're smart, they'll be more open with Xen

[raju1kabir]

What Xen _really_ blows at is usability / manageability. Setting up Xen is a pain in the ass, especially if you're on something other than 32bit x86. Figuring out obscure command line options and text config file syntax won't take them very far.

Maybe if you only use the Xen-provided tools, but that's not necessary the real-world usage scenario.

We use Debian on Xen on AMD64.

Converting a stock Debian Etch install to a Xen dom0 takes about 5 minutes, including the reboot. Creating a new domU takes about 2 minutes, from deciding to do it until I have an up-and-running virtual server.

When I compare that to the hell that was setting up (and remotely administering) VMWare, I realise I'd never want to go back. And that's without even getting into VMWare's habit of eventually swallowing up all RAM and swap on the host until everything grinds to a clanking halt.

Re:If they're smart, they'll be more open with Xen

[tji]

> Converting a stock Debian Etch install to a Xen dom0 takes about 5 minutes, including the reboot. Creating a new domU takes about 2 minutes, from deciding to do it until I have an up-and-running virtual server.

Sure, getting a Xen-capable Linux going is simple. In recent Linux distributions it's just a matter of selecting a couple packages for installation.

Installing client VMs (DomU in the really intuitive Xen nomenclature) can be easy, and can be a MAJOR pain in the ass.

Installing the trivial 'ttylinux' was painless. Specify the ISO, start the VM, and it's done before it starts.

Installing CentOS was not so simple. Install failed completely and silently. Dig around for support info.. there are hundreds of sources, each very superficial and fragmented. Finally find a random user report on a forum recommending to set the OS type to Solaris for the install. Finally works.

Installing Windows was also not a simple process. The first stage of the install was easy. Point it to the ISO, and let it fly. But, after the system reboot, re-mounting the ISO and getting the VM to find it proves to be very difficult. Finding obscure command-line options gets it moving in the right direction (although, the documented parameters fail to actually mount the ISO), after much more searching and experimentation, I was able to get it to recognize the physical disk in a CD drive and complete the install.

Installing a pre-built Xen "virtual appliance" also proves to be near impossible. This is partly because the suppliers of those appliances have little or no Xen documentation (one can only assume this reflects their userbase.. VMWare documentation is more plentiful). And, it is partly because of the configuration issues in Xen. Is this a paravirtualized image or a full hardware virtualized image? What type of disk image does it use? Again, back to hunting down configuration information all over the Internet. Many suggestions, few actually work to do anything useful. I still haven't gotten these working.

Then, with the OS's that do successfully install, using them can be troublesome. In both Windows and Linux GUI environments, there is some quirk with the mouse pointer that causes the shown VNC pointer to be offset from the GUI pointer by varying amounts (yes, I did disable mouse acceleration. Problem decreases a bit, but is still quite bad). There are many other quirks, which often don't respond well to the documented fixes: making a VM actually reboot - rather than just stopping when rebooted, requiring command line intervention to restart the VM; automatically starting VMs on reboot of the hypervisor host (Dom0). Getting a hung VM to correctly respond with status incormation or actually quit when told to. And many more issues...

Managing and monitoring multiple VMs on a host is also quite weak on Xen, and the strength of VMWare ESX server. It's all done through an intuitive GUI, tons of status and monitoring information is available, and there are bunches of APIs to extend beyond what ESX does itself.

> When I compare that to the hell that was setting up (and remotely administering) VMWare, I realise I'd never want to go back. And that's without even getting into VMWare's habit of eventually swallowing up all RAM and swap on the host until everything grinds to a clanking halt.

The only way I could see Xen, in its current state, being superior is if you absolutely had to use only text based console management. You can, and often must, manage xen from the terminal. If you want to use a GUI, to ease management and hide the details of all those command-line tools, Xen just doesn't measure up.

I have seen some third party projects that aim to make better Xen management tools. Red Hat has a Python based GUI that is better than nothing. And, as I mentioned, XenSource's proprietary tools are not bad. The good news is, that Xen could easily be very competitive.. the hard work is done, the virtual machine works. Wrap a GUI around it, and it becomes available to 10x as many users.

Re:If they're smart, they'll be more open with Xen

[raju1kabir]

The only way I could see Xen, in its current state, being superior is if you absolutely had to use only text based console management. You can, and often must, manage xen from the terminal. If you want to use a GUI, to ease management and hide the details of all those command-line tools, Xen just doesn't measure up.

To be fair, that describes my situation. I am in Malaysia and the servers I administer are in the USA. With 300ms latency and 1-megabit DSL, using VMware's GUI tools over X or VNC is positively hellish.

But I prefer text-based interfaces in general, and I like how easy it is to script my work with Xen using familiar tools.

Re:If they're smart, they'll be more open with Xen

[richlv]

it's also bad enough that i still can't get full xen with vanilla kernel. yes, 2.6.23 will merge some things, but until i don't need additional patches to kernel (that are outdated and hard to obtain), i don't feel comfortable relying on sych a solution.

as for the management tools and overall openness, i can only agree. nowadays competition in many fields is only increasing, and projects/products have to compete for users. failing to do that successfully will push the project to some distant place while other projects overtake their once dominant position.

Xen has all the pieces.

[Ayanami Rei]

We know this. The IOMMU work they are doing is _very_ interesting and I think is going to do that full circle thing (reliable hardware-assisted partitioning even in your sub-10k rackmount servers). They're in on the ground floor with this stuff. As soon as the management tools catch up, we'll be taking all this stuff for granted, and the old mainframe guys will just shake their heads.

QEMU only in the free version...

[Ayanami Rei]

If you pay for Virtual Iron, then they hook you up with a better userspace abstraction component and paravirtualized drivers for Windows XP/2003 which are infinitely better than the emulated PCNet cards and stuff (even in HVM mode). Clever bastards.

Would Be Nice...

[Nom du Keyboard]

We've got an 8-blade Citrix server rack now. Would be nice if they ran each user in their own VM.

Re:Who uses Xen?

[julesh]

Smart VPS hosts are using OpenVZ/Virtuozzo anyway.

Not really, not. VPS hosts who want to run with the herd are running Virtuozzo. Smart VPS hosts know that while Xen is more hardware-hungry, it provides a better virtual environment for demanding customers who are willing to pay a little extra cash for better flexibility.