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Xen To Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
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."
...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.
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.
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.