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Work Underway To Return Xen Support To Fedora 13
Julie188 writes "Details on this are admittedly sketchy, but both Red Hat and Xen.org have gone on record promising that some kind of support for the Xen hypervisor is forthcoming for Fedora users. As we know, on Monday, Fedora 13 was released, chock full of features to appeal to business users. One of the ballyhooed improvements to 13 is virtualization — meaning KVM and only KVM — for Red Hat. Xen was dropped from Fedora a few releases ago and it hasn't come back in 13, except that 13 still supports Xen guests. Meanwhile, 'work is underway in Xen.org to add platform support to Fedora 13 post-release,' promises Xen.org's Ian Pratt."
I was responsible for maintaining a Xen environment for about a year and a half and had much the same experience. We compile our own kernels and in this regard Xen was a nightmare. Do I stick with a 2.6.18 kernel which is the latest supported? If we do that we have to make sure to get backported security fixes. Or do we use forward-ported Xen patchsets which weren't all that reliable and were a pain in the ass to apply?
We finally switched to KVM and suddenly life got a lot easier.
(Going slightly off topic here)For a while we used libvirt and the associated tools, then we discovered Ganeti, a project at Google which has made cluster management a breeze. Libvirt has a "network" driver, but really isn't designed to manage redundant virtualization clusters. Ganeti, on the other hand, is designed specifically for managing clusters, and takes care of all the dirty work like setting up and managing LVM and DRBD. You can build out a new virtual machine, complete with an operating system in just one command, or even do it over the HTTP API. You can use Ganeti with KVM or Xen, but until/unless Xen is in mainline I won't be touching it.