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Crowdfunding Campaign Seeks a Fully Open Source Alternative to Citrix XenServer (kickstarter.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wisdom-of-crowds dept.

"Free/libre and 100% community backed version of XenServer," promises a new Kickstarter page, adding that "Our first prototype (and proof of concept) is already functional." Currently, XenServer is a turnkey virtualization platform, distributed as a distribution (based on CentOS). It comes with a feature rich toolstack, called XAPI. The vast majority of XenServer code is Open Source.

But since XenServer 7.3, Citrix removed a lot of features from it. The goal of XCP-ng is to make a fully community backed version of XenServer, without any feature restrictions. We also aim to create a real ecosystem, not depending on one company only. Simple equation: the more we are, the healthier is the environment.
The campaign reached its fundraising goal within a few hours, reports long-time Slashdot reader NoOnesMessiah, and within three days they'd already raised four times the needed amount and began unlocking their stretch goals.

66 comments

  1. Nice by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a good idea. I donated. If you don't have Open Source, you have no idea what your systems are doing. If the Intel debacle has taught us anything, it has taught us closed hardware is bad too.

    1. Re:Nice by courteaudotbiz · · Score: 1

      Not only is this a good idea because you can investigate what your software does under he hood, but you also have the ability to remove those hardcoded limitations that Citrix forced down the throat of the free version users.

      The timing of the Spectre / Meltdown bug and the release of the new Xen Server 7.3 is certainly not fortuitious, along with the fact that they said they would not release the patch for 7.2 and lower.

      They were probably informed in advance of the bugs and had the time to plan this mischievous strategy. This is a strong backstab to the XenServer community, and this community seems to have strongly demonstrated their love for XenServer and their hate for Citrix's new licensing terms.

    2. Re:Nice by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Uhhh isn't it ALREADY a FOSS product, they just have a free and paid for version and they have removed some features from the free in the hopes of getting some to buy the paid and thus stay in business?

      I always wondered if the day would come when a part of the "blessed trinity" of FOSS would break down. For those that do not know the blessed trinity is the only way one can make money in FOSS, every other way leads to failure and bankruptcy. You have to 1.- Sell services and support (which is what Xenserver is doing), 2.- Sell hardware (the Android/TiVo model) or 3.- eBegging (community projects) and while I always thought #2 would be the one to fail first as we have already seen the "TiVo clause" which caused GPL adoption to plummet (if you do not believe it has I can provide pre and post GPL 3 stats, the chart looks like a classic triangle going down) a close second would be the first part of the trinity as it really is not hard for people to have a sense of entitlement that allows themselves to justify fucking themselves in the long term for short term gains.

      Because looking up this company they appear to be exactly what the FOSS community claims they want companies to be, they make FOSS software, they support the community and give back, no different than Red Hat. They aren't even making a ton of profit, 300 million in net income on 3 billion in sales for a company that large? Really ain't shit, especially when you consider how much of that is having to be spent on talent and R&D. Yet here we are, with the company still offering a 100% free product to the community and simply trying to tweak their free product so they can get some more sales (which considering how crazy expensive it is to hire the kind of talent you need to build complex virtualization software? Is probably warranted and needed to keep up with megacorps like AMZN and MSFT) but does the community try to build a dialog? Maybe come to a mutually beneficial compromise? Nope the community fucks them over by crowdfunding a bunch who promises to give you all the benefits of the paid version for free....now do you think if Citrix goes under or is bought out by another company because they can't hire the great coders and compete that this crowdfunding bunch is gonna be able to build the product from the ground up?

      But hey biting the hand that feeds is something the FOSS community is quite adept at, right? After all look at AMD who spent untold millions opening all their software, hiring FOSS coders to work on FOSS software which they gave away, everything from a truly CPU agnostic compiler to drivers to even an entire new low level API in Vulkan, did the community embrace AMD, sing their praises and urge everyone to support them? Nope instead every article on Linux has a dozen "buy Nvidia" a company so FOSS hostile that no less than Linus Torvalds flipped them off. But just as AMD gave a great lesson to other companies that supporting FOSS gets you nothing in return so too will Citrix getting fucked provide a nice lesson that you either have to make your software so bug ridden they HAVE to pay for support or simply do not offer a free version at all because it will ultimately come back to bite you in the ass.

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    3. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They didn't build it. They're standing on the shoulders of giants already and just wanting more of the pie. XenServer is not a shiny shiny new product made from scratch by Citrix. It's based on open source. They're just exploiting loopholes in the licensing by closed-sourcing what they can to attempt to drive valuation. Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

    4. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They didn't build it. They're standing on the shoulders of giants already and just wanting more of the pie. XenServer is not a shiny shiny new product made from scratch by Citrix. It's based on open source. They're just exploiting loopholes in the licensing by closed-sourcing what they can to attempt to drive valuation. Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

      I think you don't know the history of Xen.
      "They" that built Xen are the University of Cambridge alumni that created Xen and later founded XenSource, that company which Citrix paid $500 million for.
      The shoulders of giants you refer to have been employees of Citrix since 2007 and paid by Citrix to continue development of Xen both as the enterprise product and the open source product.

    5. Re:Nice by HuguesT · · Score: 1

      AMD GPUs are popular with Open-source rigs, especially since the OSS driver performance is on par or better than the closed-source one even on recent GPUs. but several things play agains AMD becoming more popular on OSS rigs.

      GPUs are no longer used only for gaming. For instance AMD GPUs are more efficient at crypto-mining, meaning that there is a premium on them and stocks have been low. This is great news for AMD by the way but not so much for gamers. Meanwhile Nvidia has been investing a great deal in GPU computing for scientific applications, especially these days for deep learning. Most DL frameworks only support Nvidia, including big-name ones like Google with Tensorflow.

    6. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So much bullshit. It shows you are TOTALLY ignorant of what's going on there :D

      Do you think people like to make fork only by pleasure? It's a TON of work and commitment, people to hire etc. Just check Citrix practice regarding "Open Source". **No build process anywhere, no documentation, nothing**. They just rip open source stuff for their own products, without bringing anything in return. **Even refusing community pull requests or feature enhancements**. It's NOT Open Source.

      They got what they deserve.

    7. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      simply trying to tweak their free product so they can get some more sales

      Imagine if Evian decided to tweak their lower tier water by whizzing in the bottles, hoping that sales of their higher tier water would increase. It's a stupid business move no matter what is being sold.

      Tweak the upper tier model to have special stuff, don't take away things that people can get for free elsewhere in the hopes that they'll pay you more money for those same things.

    8. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      protip: xenserver is less than 5% of Citrix's annual revenue. Upper management sees it and treats it as a small backend tool that makes their main products (xendesktop etc) work. It could completely disappear as a standalone Citrix product and the new management Citrix is under would be pleased. But still, your baseless platitudes completely ignoring the history of Xen were entertaining to read at the very least

  2. Removes a single point of failure--or e$ploitation by sehlat · · Score: 1

    Bravo!

  3. What, Citrix is still alive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What the hell is going on, who is virtualizing what?

  4. Why not KVM? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    Pardon my ignorance on the topic but what can this offer that Linux's KVM cannot?

    --
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    1. Re:Why not KVM? by bogaboga · · Score: 2

      This page has KVM's "ToDo" list. A good number of items on that list are supported by Xen. In addition, KVM will not play well [if at all], with older CPUs made prior to extensions enabling virtualization.

      KVM also doesn't work with Intel's Atom CPUs unless extensions are available.

    2. Re:Why not KVM? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      Xen supports para-virtualization, which was built into the original GPL version of Xen and remains useful to approach "bare-metal" speed for the virtual machines. Much of the need for this has been reduced through the development of "docker", which can be treated much like a Xen based para-virtualized VM with instances of even lighter weight.

      The very active CentOS Xen community has, as I've observed, been much larger and much more active than KVM in dealing with new server and guest environments. My information may be out of date: this may also just mean KVM worked well since then. But I've seen a number of clients simply give up on KVM and just switch to Xen or Citrix Xen. due to unexpected limitations and the time necessary to spend valuable engineering time tuning their own virtualization servers. It's no longer on my recommended product list.

      Indeed, for small environments, VirtualBox has proven much better due to its cross-platform services for the virtual servers and its ties to Vagrant testing tools. I'd be very surprised to see another new virtualization toolkit enter the already crowded market.

    3. Re:Why not KVM? by AlanObject · · Score: 2, Interesting

      KVM also doesn't work with Intel's Atom CPUs unless extensions are available.

      It doesn't? In my last company we used an Atom C2000 and we used KVM/Libvirt to run VMs on it using Ubuntu 14.04. In fact we had one design win that depended on it.

      You may be thinking of the feature (I forget the code name) that lets you virtual-ize PCI devices. It couldn't do that so you had to rely on the linux kernel bridge or OpenVSwitch.

    4. Re:Why not KVM? by bestweasel · · Score: 1

      The virtio drivers provide paravirtualization for KVM. I don't know how they compare with Xen but it used to be quicker than VirtualBox.

    5. Re:Why not KVM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That page hasn't been updated in over two years, though. I have no way of knowing what was fixed, but I doubt KVM development has simply stalled for that long...

    6. Re:Why not KVM? by whoever57 · · Score: 0

      Paravirtualization is really only useful when the host CPU doesn't have the hardware necessary for virtualization. Since that is almost no x86 CPUs these days, the value of paravirtualization is low.

      In addition, KVM supports Virtio drivers for network and disk drives, reducing the value of the paravirtualization approach even more.

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    7. Re:Why not KVM? by tbuskey · · Score: 1

      I've run KVM and OpenStack (using KVM) on Atom based systems it definitly works.

    8. Re:Why not KVM? by bestweasel · · Score: 1

      "Paravirtualization is really only useful when the host CPU doesn't have the hardware necessary for virtualization."

      That's not true. Paravirtualization can provide better performance in either case. From the virtio wiki

      So-called "full virtualization" is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualized. However, it's slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as RTL8139 network cards . This emulation is both complicated and inefficient.

      Virtio is a virtualization standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization.

      Note that virtio is different, but architecturally similar to, Xen paravirtualized device drivers (such as the ones that you can install in a Windows guest to make it go faster under Xen). Also similar is VMWare's Guest Tools.

    9. Re:Why not KVM? by ilsaloving · · Score: 1

      XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.

      The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.

    10. Re:Why not KVM? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      Are those working well? I'd not tried them the last time I worked with KVM.

    11. Re:Why not KVM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      virt-manager.

    12. Re:Why not KVM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This page has KVM's "ToDo" list. A good number of items on that list are supported by Xen. In addition, KVM will not play well [if at all], with older CPUs made prior to extensions enabling virtualization.

      KVM also doesn't work with Intel's Atom CPUs unless extensions are available.

      KVM still seems the key. Start with maybe ubuntu server install and an apache web server.

      Build a UI that controls all the VM's with some kind of web front end.

      One of the tricks is going to viewing remote systems. There is a remote desktop variant that encodes displays as h264 or similar. That should be viewable in a web page. Better yet, if you can somehow tie into existing paravirtual drivers in common distributions, though there are some details there to work out.

      This might be a good test case for web assembly as well. The main thing is to avoid having to have to have special "client" software.

      Supporting software raid out of the box is a nice to have. Linux can certainly do it, though you have to boot from something else.

      I'm not sure how it works, but I think encoding h264 video with nvidia cards is doable these days, or at least some of the work is offloaded. Supporting something like that out of the box, so your remove experience, even in a web browser is smooth would likely make the distribution popular more quickly.

      The previous post mentions older CPUs. I don't think that would be a priority. It is going to take a lot of effort to make a good alternative, and it is important to spend it carefully.

    13. Re:Why not KVM? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      KVM will not play well [if at all], with older CPUs made prior to extensions enabling virtualization.

      KVM is a module for doing virtualization in qemu. It requires VT (or equivalent) but you can still use qemu without KVM. However, for the target market, that's not a drawback. Statistically nobody is running KVM or Xen on a processor so old it doesn't have virtualization extensions.

      --
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    14. Re:Why not KVM? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.

      The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.

      When was that? 4+ years ago? oVirt, the open-source project that Red Hat Virtualisation is built on, supports all the features (and many many more) that (than) XenServer has in the paid version. In fact, it has all the features that RHV has, except the branding and commercial support.

      oVirt has been viable as a complete open-source solution since about the 3.3 release which was in Sept 2013. 3.0 was the first release to ditch the old .Net-based UI that came from Qumranet that was still shipped in RHEV 2.x.

    15. Re:Why not KVM? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      Xen supports para-virtualization, which was built into the original GPL version of Xen and remains useful to approach "bare-metal" speed for the virtual machines.

      No, para-virtualisation is no longer useful. PV is dead, kiilled by Spectre.

      Much of the need for this has been reduced through the development of "docker", which can be treated much like a Xen based para-virtualized VM with instances of even lighter weight.

      WHAT???? You can't compare PV with docker (no virtualisation, just process containment via namespaces). HV with accelerated IO drivers has displaced PV.

      The very active CentOS Xen community has, as I've observed, been much larger and much more active than KVM in dealing with new server and guest environments.

      What???? That might seem to be the case because very few people use Xen, so the CentOS Xen community it the only place there is any open-source concerted effort around Xen. But, that is because all the concerted open-source virtualisation effort is happening on Linux/KVM.

      My information may be out of date: this may also just mean KVM worked well since then. But I've seen a number of clients simply give up on KVM and just switch to Xen or Citrix Xen. due to unexpected limitations and the time necessary to spend valuable engineering time tuning their own virtualization servers. It's no longer on my recommended product list.

      KVM isn't a full virtualisation solution, in the same way that Xen (not XenServer) is not a full virtualisation solution. It is just the hypervisor. There are a number of full virtualisation solutions that either support KVM only, or where KVM is the first-class hypervisor, namely:
      - oVirt, or if you want, the commercially supported version from Red Hat, called Red Hat Virtualisation
      - Openstack
      - Proxmox
      - many more

      If you were ever punting KVM stand-alone, you've done it a dis-service.

      Indeed, for small environments, VirtualBox has proven much better due to its cross-platform services for the virtual servers and its ties to Vagrant testing tools. I'd be very surprised to see another new virtualization toolkit enter the already crowded market.

      For most of the uses of vagrant (mainly used for developers to spin up dev VMs on their own machine), docker *is* probably a better tool, but Virtualbox is really not a solution for server virtualisation at all, there are so many better open-source solutions available that are community-owned (not owned by Oracle).

    16. Re:Why not KVM? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      "Paravirtualization is really only useful when the host CPU doesn't have the hardware necessary for virtualization."

      That's not true. Paravirtualization can provide better performance in either case.

      Only in the case where your hardware doesn't support VT-d and SR-IOV (other hardware features built for IO virtualisation).

    17. Re:Why not KVM? by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Virtualization extensions are not exactly new, they've been around for more than 10 years now... It's highly unlikely that anyone will be deploying such old processors on a hypervisor system.

      KVM works fine on many models of Atom, i've used it on a few. The really lowend models are again not the sort of systems you'd actually be using something like this on.

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    18. Re:Why not KVM? by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      There are a variety of systems out there which do this...

      Proxmox for one, SolusVM, and many more.

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    19. Re:Why not KVM? by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Works very well, supported out of the box on linux for many years and available as an installable driver package for windows, there is now support for virtio in various bsd flavors too.

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    20. Re:Why not KVM? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please read the post you are replying to before replying to it:

      https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-atom-c2000-processor-family-technical-overview

      The C2000 has extensions available. I believe this is relatively rare for Atom CPUs as Intel generally work on the assumption that if you want VMs you can afford more expensive processors...

    21. Re:Why not KVM? by ilsaloving · · Score: 1

      Quite possibly. One doesn't up and change their entire VM infrastructure at the drop of a hat, so there's little incentive to keep up on up and coming technologies unless you're explicitly looking to make a change. Or if something comes up that so newsworthy that it manages to punch through all the noise.

      oVirt has definitely improved a lot since I last looked. However, one of my biggest complains still stands. You have to configure a frightening amount by hand without any tools to automate. I am leary of doing things manually because for every step a person has to perform in a process, that's a step that can get screwed up somehow. While it does give you a lot of power, it's also extremely high risk. Considering that it explicitly targets RHEL/Centos7 and only that, there should be no reason why there isn't a whole bunch of best practise automation mechanisms to set up key elements like hooking up the ISCSI (or NFS) backend. It seems like oVirt is designed primarily for orgs with very deep pockets and can afford things like an extensive FC infrastructure, and large IT department with enough manpower capacity to dedicate to setting the thing up.

      Compare that against XenCenter, where you can almost fully admin the host itself from the GUI. It's incredibly easy and straightforward to get up and running, and you don't need to touch command line at all unless you're doing something unusual. This includes setting up ISCSI storage, networking, etc. Furthermore, and this is more a mark of maturity rather than a ding against quality, but XenServer has an HCL and best practises information available for setting things up. If you don't have the resources to spare for futzing with configuration settings 'n whatnot, having established standards to based your setup on is extremely valuable.

    22. Re: Why not KVM? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      oVirt has definitely improved a lot since I last looked. However, one of my biggest complains still stands. You have to configure a frightening amount by hand without any tools to automate.

      Wrong. You can script setup of the entire solution, ujt the exact methods may differ (depending on how you deploy the manager, as a VM or stand-alone server, and previously also whether you installed the nodes from image or on top of RHEL (answer file or kickstart).

      New in the current release are provided ansible roles for setting up varoois components (I havan't dug into this though).

      Considering that it explicitly targets RHEL/Centos7 and only that, there should be no reason why there isn't a whole bunch of best practise automation mechanisms to set up key elements like hooking up the ISCSI (or NFS) backend.

      Anything for setting up the manager (including as a VM on the first host) can be scripted via engine_setup or hosted_engine_setup. Anything aftet via the REST API or ansible.

      It seems like oVirt is designed primarily for orgs with very deep pockets and can afford things like an extensive FC infrastructure, and large IT department with enough manpower capacity to dedicate to setting the thing up.

      The primary target of the commercial versipn is to replace VMWare. But that doesn't always mean expensive (see hyper-converged).

      Compare that against XenCenter, where you can almost fully admin the host itself from the GUI.

      I believe in 4.x, the nodes run the new cockpit web UI, and can have their initial setup done using it.

      Furthermore, and this is more a mark of maturity rather than a ding against quality, but XenServer has an HCL and best practises information available for setting things up.

      I the coverage wider than the Red Hat hardware certification, which applies to RHV?

      There are validated configurations acailable for a few different setups, e.g. NetApp has provided one for running RHEV on NetApp filers.

    23. Re: Why not KVM? by ilsaloving · · Score: 1

      Wrong. You can script setup of the entire solution, ujt the exact methods may differ (depending on how you deploy the manager, as a VM or stand-alone server, and previously also whether you installed the nodes from image or on top of RHEL (answer file or kickstart).

      Key part bolded. Again, (and this is based on a very cursory viewing of the admin docs) this isn't provided by them. You have to write your own scripts and set up your own automation. That means you now have to learn to manage and use not only oVirt, but Ansible and other tools as well.

      The primary target of the commercial versipn is to replace VMWare. But that doesn't always mean expensive (see hyper-converged).

      Okay, fair enough. Enterprises with elaborate VMWare setups are going to already have the resources to set something like oVirt up.

      Unfortunately that's a handicap for smaller companies that are just getting started with their VM infrastructure and don't necessarily have the expertise or the manpower available to do that level of setup. Having the tools already available OOTB would be extremely valuable to such organizations.

      As it stands, it's hard to say how strong Citrix' position is going to be 5 years from now. Having lost AWS as a major vendor was a big blow. Citrix doing this feature removal in the Free version, while understandable, I fear will hurt them more than it will help, mindshare-wise. Especially since KVM's ecosystem is clearly maturing rapidly.

    24. Re: Why not KVM? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      Wrong. You can script setup of the entire solution, ujt the exact methods may differ (depending on how you deploy the manager, as a VM or stand-alone server, and previously also whether you installed the nodes from image or on top of RHEL (answer file or kickstart).

      Key part bolded. Again, (and this is based on a very cursory viewing of the admin docs) this isn't provided by them. You have to write your own scripts and set up your own automation. That means you now have to learn to manage and use not only oVirt, but Ansible and other tools as well.

      It's a bit hidden (but hinted at) in the RHV documentation (but the options are in the engine-setup --help, and it always tells you it is writing answer files). See this page which has a section on answer files.

      Ansible is an additional option for shops that already have it, not required for scripting installation.

      Okay, fair enough. Enterprises with elaborate VMWare setups are going to already have the resources to set something like oVirt up.

      Anyone who hasn't got the resources to run a hyper-converged (IOW, software-defined storage cluster on the same hosts that run VMs, instead of expensive storage appliances that have sufficient redundancy to not be a SPOF) on either VMWare or RHEV or oVirt should probably just run in public cloud, it will probably work out cheaper for the same breadth of tooling.

  5. Need to have by l0n3s0m3phr34k · · Score: 1

    A clear and easy path to migrate off Citrix ZenServer, once enough of the current features are duplicated. Making the whole thing 800-171 compliant would also open up a huge niche market.

    1. Re:Need to have by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      I agree this would be a good thing... but I’m not sure Kickstarter is the way to go for something where you’d ideally want broad corporate backing, given Kickstarters have a habit of just disappearing with your money.

      Of course I’m assuming people want this professionally. If it’s really the case that people want it for their home hobby servers, then Kickstarter is fine.

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  6. wrong headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Crowdfunding Campaign Seeks a Fully Open Source Fork of Citrix XenServer

    An alternative would be something based off of a different architecture, which would be nice. It sucks for competition when all of the "alternatives" are just forks of a commercial product.

  7. FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But even with open source, the average user (who is not a programmer) still has no idea what their systems are doing. There's an assumption that in open source lots of people are working on the code so there's no problems; the last few years, with their multitude of breaches discovered in open source, have proven that.

    I of course prefer open source as much as possible, but it only works WELL when it's a popular, widely-used project that actually does have a lot of support. This XenServer project looks like it could be a winner. But what we don't need are any more projects with 1-5 programmers trying to build yet another Linux distro or an open source way to look up pizza coupons or some crap. The FOSS movement has to learn to organize, collaborate, and do some extent centralize efforts. Fewer projects, but better and more useful ones.

    1. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by ilsaloving · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Remember that when you're next in a hospital and need heart surgery. I don't know about you but I'd rather have someone specialized to the task.

      Software development requires a specific skill set, time, and energy that not everyone has. Despite all that bullshit Bill Gates et al are spewing about everyone learning to code, not everyone can code. Even if they had the talent, they may not have the time to learn it on top of whatever else they're doing.

      Your argument is breathtakingly ignorant, and a perfect example of the self-important attitude that keeps Linux and most other OSS projects from going mainstream.

    2. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by mspohr · · Score: 2

      To continue your analogy... Would you rather have a heart surgeon who learned his craft from a secret society using methods which have not been openly peer reviewed OR would you like a heart surgeon who studies all of the open literature on heart surgery and learns the best practices from his/her peers.

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    3. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by ilsaloving · · Score: 2

      That's actually not the comparison I was making. I was trying to point out not everyone who uses software, has the time AND the energy AND the skill to also maintain software. A heart surgeon, for example, cares about medicine. They care about saving lives. It is a demanding job that already requires a lot of time and energy and skill to master, and that doesn't leave much room for software development.

      But according to the GP, because they don't ALSO know how to do software development, said heart surgeon can go fuck themselves. And that's just idiotic.

      To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.

    4. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      "Whatever else they're doing" is why more open code source is needed.

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    5. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Voyager529 · · Score: 1

      But even with open source, the average user (who is not a programmer) still has no idea what their systems are doing.

      I think this is accurate to a large extent, but I'd similarly argue that licensing is less relevant to such users as well; free-as-in-beer matters more to such users than free-as-in-freedom. It's possible that Xenserver 7.2 will continue to live for quite some time; bare metal hypervisors generally need updating less often than guest OSes (well, except Hyper-V). Xenserver is, for the most part, in competition with Proxmox, the free version of ESXi, the free version of Hyper-V Server, and of late, Docker in many instances.

      Now, admittedly these hypervisors are not at exact feature parity, but the reality of the situation is that most folks who are rolling out hypervisors to run VMs aren't also pouring through hundreds of megabytes of source code, meaning that at the end of the day, they have to trust someone. Whether it's a group of internet volunteers, or Citrix, or VMWare, or Microsoft, either one trusts, or one doesn't. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but the fact that source code is available isn't itself a dealbreaker for the overwhelming majority of users.

    6. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you smoking by the way?

    7. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by mspohr · · Score: 1

      To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.

      Your "different camps" are just like proprietary software developed by different companies who don't share trade secrets.
      Open source heart surgery publishes results for everyone to learn from.

      --
      I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
    8. Re: FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Because everyone always hires the best for a specific task. Ever hear of Therac-25 maybe you should look it up.

      Closed source/open source it does not matter.
      For the open source advocates: Tell me when was the last time you actually looked over every line of code in an open source system? For how long did you monitor all updates after? How many systems were included? Who is responsible for all of that? How do you know you can trust them? If someone paid to have the software analysed and a bug that they could exploit for their own benefit is found, what incentive do they have to tell anyone else about it? (Caugh... NSA caugh...)
      For the closed source advocates:
      Just a few things to keep in mind. Ever wonder how many features are in the products you buy? How many undocumented features? How many non-requested or undesired features? What do you do if the firm supporting your software goes under or sells your contract to someone who does not care about it? Ever hear about white-box testing, guess what closed source means you need to rely on someone else to get that right.

      Open source is not inharently better than closed source. Sure it grants you a few options, but unless your on the verge of being insane you have little incentive to take advantage of those. Which means you need to pay someone else to do all that. When was the last time you donated to linux, mozilla, or any other open source project? So why is it so much better than closed source?

    9. Re: FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your attitude is a perfect representation of how to fail at business.

    10. Re: FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Nothing is perfect, open is still a few steps ahead of closed because the opportunities are available to you even if you choose not to take them, and everyone has an equal level of access to the code.
      Every problem that *can* happen to open source, can and does happen to closed source code as well, but closed source has an additional set of problems too.

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    11. Re:FOSS must learn to organize and collaborate by Tekfactory · · Score: 1

      Except in Open Source we'd have 5 different camps not doing heart surgery but squabbling over which scalpels to use and designing new scalpels that don't work in standard autoclaves because of their 3d printed ergonomic handles and the actual practice of the surgery would be the exact same as it is now.

  8. That name though... by JustNiz · · Score: 2

    Really no one could come up with a better name than "XCP-ng"?

    1. Re:That name though... by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2

      May I be the first to propose "Maude" on the grounds that you can pronounce it, spell check it, and have a reasonable chance of googling it. If you want to go the whole Ubuntu, then "Maniacal-Maude".

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    2. Re:That name though... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      Hey, at least it's not a stupid pun or borderline offensive word. Open source projects have a terrible record for naming.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  9. docker / k8s will make this irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The rate of growth of "run the entire os as a VM " will be dropping precipitously, and the cool OSS kids will be doing k8s related stuff ...

  10. Why not guset drivers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see one VERY big hole in their approach. Non-mainstream OS, like say BeOS, or NeXTStep, or even OpenGenera, since for all of them there are no "guest drivers".

    1. Re:Why not guset drivers? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      Excuse me, but "para-virtualization" is an optional feature and an effective performance enhancement for virtualization: Every virtualization technology supports hardware virtualization.

  11. XenOrchestra by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's just them asking for money. I guess the totally free approach didn't work?

    BTW Xen is FOSS. XenCitrix is built upon it. Get off your arse and build your own Xen, instead of jumping off Citrix's back!

  12. Why not oVirt? by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

    "Build a UI that controls all the VM's with some kind of web front end.

    One of the tricks is going to viewing remote systems. There is a remote desktop variant that encodes displays as h264 or similar. That should be viewable in a web page. Better yet, if you can somehow tie into existing paravirtual drivers in common distributions, though there are some details there to work out."

    You mean like oVirt (www.ovirt.org), which has all of these (or equivalent features) and more, including live migration, HA support for running the manager as a "managed" VM, support/integration for running Glusterfs on the "nodes" to be used for storing VM disk images (aka hyper-converged) etc.

    1. Re:Why not oVirt? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice. I didn't know about that one.

      Does anyone care to compare it to everything else out there?

      I'm somewhat curious if it can handle software raid 6 and large partitions? I'll have to research it sometime..

  13. xenproject.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How is this different from the software at xenproject.org?

  14. raised four times the needed amount by ryanmc1 · · Score: 2

    "The campaign reached its fundraising goal within a few hours, reports long-time Slashdot reader NoOnesMessiah, and within three days they'd already raised four times the needed amount and began unlocking their stretch goals."

    Sorry I don't follow a lot of kickstarter campaigns, but of the ones I have heard about it seems like the ones that over raise are more likely to fail. I think it is a matter of their eyes are bigger than their ability to execute. I will be interested to see if this one can keep their expectations in check and not let feature creep kill the project.

    1. Re: raised four times the needed amount by Uncle+Warthog · · Score: 1

      I'd feel the same way if they hadn't already released a working proof-of-concept. It's based on XenServer 7.2 while what they'll be working on will be based on 7.3. A good number of the stretch goals have been done by users on the side for one purpose or another at times or by folks inside the Xen project or involved with XenOrchestra as proofs-of-concept as well. For example, software RAID is fairly common in small lab settings for XenServer installations, one I've used myself.

  15. Try this instead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Proxmox. Great alternative.