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Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-of-us-one-of-us dept.

jrepin writes "The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. The Xen Project is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. As the project experiences contributions from an increasingly diverse group of companies, it is looking to The Linux Foundation to be a neutral forum for providing guidance and facilitating a collaborative network."

16 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Wouldn't KVM... by unixisc · · Score: 2

    Wouldn't KVM be the most natural fit for a Linux virtualization project? Or are we talking about something other than Xen virtualization project here?

    1. Re:Wouldn't KVM... by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wouldn't KVM be the most natural fit for a Linux virtualization project? Or are we talking about something other than Xen virtualization project here?

      Xen has been around longer, as I understand it, and at one time I used it in para-virtualization mode because running Linux VMs on the non-assist hardware I had at the time was very painful, performance-wise. I still have 1 VM host running para-virtualized.

      For a while it appeared that Red Hat - one of Xen's initial promoters - was going to drop Xen for KVM, but they seem to have been retreating from that. At any rate, recent RHEL kernels are easier for me to work with using Xen than KVM, for the most part. Don't take that as meaning much, however, since Xen is where I have a lot more practice.

    2. Re:Wouldn't KVM... by styrotech · · Score: 3, Informative

      This isn't the Linux Foundation going looking for a virtualisation project and picking Xen.

      From what I've read, this is the open source Xen community asking Citrix if the open source project can shift to being run by an independent foundation, Citrix agreeing to that, and the Xen community picking the Linux Foundation as the best fit.

      I'm sure that if Redhat wanted to move KVM to the Linux Foundation, that would be able to happen too. It would be like eg the Apache Foundation managing 'competing' projects just fine.

      The Xen community felt that this move will make it easier for other companies and developers to contribute to the open source Xen project, and hope that it will improve collaboration with other projects etc etc.

      Citrix still has its commercial XenServer product, and will presumably still employ developers to work on the open source Xen. But the management of the open source project is now independent from Citrix.

      Personally I think it's a good move - after all Xen is running an awful lot of hosting/cloud providers out there.

    3. Re:Wouldn't KVM... by burne · · Score: 2

      Well.. I have 1648 paying Xen-customers and 1 paying KVM-customer.

      If it were my money I'd go for Xen. Like I did.

      (for context: the average customer pays roughly $100 per month..)

    4. Re:Wouldn't KVM... by jawtheshark · · Score: 2

      Recently I got myself a nice little rackmount for experiments at home. My own little computer lab, so to say. Now, at work we use Xen: basically Debian Dom0 with lots and lots of Debian DomU. I think we have exactly one Windows server in a DomU. It's a simple situation, really.

      Given I read on serveral forums that KVM is "the preferred Linux virtualization technology", I'd thought: Well, why not use that instead. Now, I admit, I was too lazy to read the manpages, but from the How-To's I read, this is much closer to something like VirtualBox. There are serveral tools to create the VM, and you need to go through the whole installation process in a console. That's okay for a one-off installation. Sure, you can clone an existing image.

      On Xen? Make an LVM partition (or if you have a SAN, use that... Basically: give it a block device), create a configuration file (manually, it's pretty human-readable), format it from the DomU, then run debootstrap on it, then modify a few files, and... start it up... done. No additional bootloaders needed, no console installation process: Just a filesystem with a Linux installation. Heck, I have scripted this. Works wonderfully.

      I didn't manage to find a way to do it as easy as this on KVM. I'm sure it exists, and I've found some HowTo's hinting to it being able to be done. I'm sure I didn't look long enough and deep enough into it. It most certainly is my fault. However, I went back to Xen for my toy server, because it is so insanely simple to manage (from the command line, I don't need or want graphical interfaces for this).

      --
      Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  2. Xen's biggest obstacle right now by skids · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...from my own anecdotal perspective, is that VMs are very often used as a way to isolate commercial software products into their own little box where they don't have to play nice with other applications on the box -- and which VM's are supported for these products depends entirely on the vendor. Major vendors who have these products are only just now beginning to think beyond VMWare, and when they do, they are thinking HyperV before Xen. Not many shops want to be supporting more than one virtualization suite -- the only reason they do is because some vendors demand VMWare for their crap, and the price difference between that and supporting a second suite is workable. Once the VMWare premium is out of the picture, because vendors went to HyperV, there will be less of a compelling reason to maintain support for a second suite.

    So closed source software vendors may dictate which suite wins between HyperV and Xen.

    --
    Someone had to do it.
    1. Re:Xen's biggest obstacle right now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agree 1000%. We have a fairly large VMWare cluster. Okay, maybe not that large, but it consists of 6*4U quad-socket, 8 core per socket servers with 512GB of RAM each. You can host a lot of stuff with that.

      What has happened is that any time a user says they need a new source code repo, a new application, another build server for their project, or whatever, is that we just spin up another virtual machine for them. That's how our IT middle management has sold this solution to our executives (being able to provide computing resources to the company on-demand with a rapid turnaround).

      What gets forgotten in all of this is that nobody does any proper engineering of the applications being ran to see if they need the resources being requested, or if they could be combined with other applications and run on the same instance. (For example, there is absolutely no need to have three separate CVS servers, two git servers, and two Perforce servers). Then we have users who for political reasons demand that they be given a software build environment for their project that is isolated from the build environment for another project. A quick analysis of resource usage statistics does not justify the creation of additional servers. Regardless, all of these requests are acquiesced to to make the other departments in the company happy.

      Then you have all of the old physical servers. Normally when a server gets long in the tooth, it's time to upgrade the application and put it on new hardware. Now with virtualization, we just take the same outdated application and simply P2V it, and it continues being the same unsupportable mess that it was before, now only it's running on stable hardware (a small positive to all of this I guess).

    2. Re:Xen's biggest obstacle right now by pscottdv · · Score: 2

      Perhaps, but I have found that I can very often use a chroot jail when some would use a virtual machine. It takes more knowledge to set up, but generally performs better and can interact with applications on the native platform.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    3. Re:Xen's biggest obstacle right now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Can jails do live migration between hosts?
      How about live storage migration? (awesome when it comes time to migrate to a new SAN)
      Do they have a centralized management software that in the case of a hardware failure auto starts the jail on another machine?
      Templates?
      Snapshots?
      Dynamic resource management (i.e. CPU is busy on this machine, migrate the more idle VMs to another host to increase performance for the busy app)?
      Built in APIs for deploying new jails?
      Shared storage devices across physical hosts? (could be done with jails, but it would have to be setup on any host machine that you were going to run the jail on ahead of time)
      Separation of all system libraries so that updating the main host/any of the jails doesn't affect code running in your jails?

      Using virtualization also means that you can do things like apply a Windows datacenter license to a host, which means you can spin up as many Windows VMs for no extra cost on that host. I believe RedHat does the same for RHEL if you are running on RHEV. There may be plenty overhead, but if it was a big application that needs that much CPU power you should probably have it on bare metal anyways, which means that VMs are often your more idle machines.

    4. Re:Xen's biggest obstacle right now by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2

      I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  3. Re:Why not KVM when it has all of the momentum? by stox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For some workloads, Xen outperforms kvm, and vice versa. It is better for us all to have competing open source solutions than competing against closed source solutions. Also worth noting, Yes Xen was pretty much dead in the water for some time, but since getting their act together and getting support in the mainline kernel, they have been doing very well.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  4. OpenVZ by tobia.conforto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OpenVZ is very much like jails for Linux. I introduced it at my job four years ago and we've been using it ever since. I can attest to the savings in hardware overhead and in sysadmin time, compared to the alternatives of either full-blown VMs or all-services-in-one-Linux-box.

    Nowadays there is also LXC, which supposedly is the future for Linux jails, seeing as their patch-set got into the mainline kernel—something OpenVZ failed to achieve. But IMHO LXC is not as stable and reliable as OpenVZ, nor as well-isolated by default, which is an aspect that is too often neglected.

    1. Re:OpenVZ by MyHair · · Score: 2

      Things may have changed in the past couple of years, but I distro-upgraded-before-I-looked from Ubuntu Hardy LTS to Lucid LTS and found that the OpenVZ components were removed and LXC components added which threw me for a few loops on my home containers. At the time I found LXC to be lacking in tools and documentation, and OpenVZ wasn't being supported in a sane way. I had enough troubles with Lucid in containers that I put everything on a hard box and later moved all of it to Windows and Ubuntu-in-Hyper-V. But once LXC has decent tools and documentation I might look into it again. Sharing a kernel was very handy for my home sites.

  5. Re:Why not KVM when it has all of the momentum? by undeadbill · · Score: 2

    No, RedHat has been co-opting projects that give it a unique competitive edge. They pretty much own the KVM project, and now they don't have to compete with Citrix on the Xen platform. RHEL dropped support for Xen in version 6, at which point the Linux kernel devs retorted by putting Xen support into the kernel. If Xen was such a dog, then why would the Linux kernel dev team work so hard to keep it?

    I'm not downing KVM or Xen. Both work well for their intended purposes. But RHEL's decision probably had more to do with RHEL's commitment to *selling* KVM centric solutions than it had to do with anything else.

  6. Re:I didn't even need to wait for "cloud computing by nametaken · · Score: 2

    Damn you. I'm still missing "synergistic".

  7. Coolest use of XEN that I know of- by Burz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://qubes-os.org/

    It gives you hardware-enforced security for your desktop.