virtualization.info

Citrix launches today the public beta of XenServer 5.6, which is released as open source since February, and Essentials for XenServer 5.6.

The list of new features includes:

• Dynamic Memory Control (DMC)
  This feature can increase the number of VMs per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing VMs to be compressed so that additional VMs can boot on the host. 
• Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management
  Workload balancing (WLB) offers the ability to reduce power consumption by consolidating workloads on the smallest number of hosts and powering off unused hosts.
  Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others. WLB configuration now includes the option to exclude specific hosts from WLB algorithms.
• Granular Role-based Access Controls
  Administrative users can be assigned one of several roles, which govern the actions they are able to complete from XenCenter and the command-line interface (CLI).
• Administrative Logging and Audit
  Administrative changes made from XenCenter or the CLI are logged and available in the Workload Reports in XenCenter.
• StorageLink Site Recovery Enhanced integration with storage-level replication enables recovery of an entire virtual infrastructure at a secondary disaster recovery site.
• Citrix License Server integration.
  Essentials for XenServer features are now activated using a license applied to a Citrix Licensing Server. 
• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4
• Support for up to 64 logical processors, 256 GB RAM, and 16 NICs per host
• Support for OVF import/export in XenCenter

Of course the first two features are the most interesting.

Dynamic Memory Control (DMC), a memory overcommit technique, auto-adjust the memory of running virtual machines, but keeps the memory within a range of pre-defined functioning limits (dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum) as specified by the administrator.
When DMC is enabled, even when hosts are full, XenServer will attempt to reclaim memory (by reducing the memory allocation of running VMs within their defined dynamic ranges). In this way running VMs are squeezed proportionally at the same distance between the dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum for all VMs on the host.
So, while DMC is on and the host's memory is plentiful, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Maximum Memory level. When DMC is on and the host's memory is scarce, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Minimum Memory level.

Citrix supports DMC only with certain guest operating systems and only within specific vRAM ranges:

While the description makes DMC sounds like the Transparent Memory Compression technology that VMware may introduce in the next vSphere, it’s evident that they are different technologies.

The Automated Workload Balancing & Power Management feature instead clearly offers similar features of the VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM).

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Citrix recently released a new open source tool to simplify virtual machines migration from the open source Xen hypervisor to its open source implementation XenServer and the upcoming Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

The virtual to virtual (V2V) migration utility is written in Python and can either perform an offline conversion of a Xen VM into that XVA format that XenServer and XCP understand, or live streaming the VM to the two target platforms.

The tool supports both para-virtualized and hardware-virtualization-assisted (HVM) virtual machines but it still is in its early stage and Citrix warns about issues and bugs.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, Xen

Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber).

Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them.

The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol.
This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example).

To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,  with its list of “friends”. 
Every management task can be executed through chat messages, and geographically distant virtual infrastructures can communicate through remote XMPP servers.

Labels: KVM, OpenVZ, Oracle, Platform Management, Sun, Tools, Xen

ConVirt (formerly XenMan) is an open source management console that supports multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
Originally started in 2006, the product was relaunched in March 2009, demonstrating a significant potential.

One year later, the company behind ConVirt, Convirture, releases version 2.0, which once again features notable capabilities:

• new architecture
  made of an AJAX web front-end which supports multiple administrators and a back-end data repository for the entire virtual infrastructure
• performance trends reporting
  capability to produce interactive charts about historical information in the data repository
• template compliance tracking
  capability to track how much a virtual machine changed from its original template and to flag discrepancies
• datacenter-wide monitoring
  both storage and network resources can be monitored from a single console rather than checking each host configuration

The company is still offering the product as open source, but it’s also trying to monetize it with the introduction of an Enterprise Edition (currenty in beta).

This product will add to the open source edition the following capabilities:

• dynamic resources allocation (through the use of resource pools)
• high availability (through hosts and virtual machines fail-over)
• virtual machines backup (both scheduled and on-demand)
• network and storage automated configuration (VLAN and SAN setup across multiple hosts)
• role-based access control
• alerting and email notification
• CLI and APIs

Labels: Convirture, KVM, Platform Management, Releases, Xen

A couple of weeks ago Citrix announced a new partnership with Novell on virtualization.

The deal includes two parts.
The first one is focused on providing joint technical support to those customers that run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a XenServer guest OS.
The second one grants the use of Platespin Recon for Citrix and its Solutions Advisors partners.

While Novell could be considered a Citrix competitor because of its implementation of Xen, the reality is that, at the moment, Citrix has no interest in competing with anybody at the hypervisor layer.
The Citrix strategy is focused on placing XenDesktop on top of every possible hypervisor. And this includes ESX, Hyper-V and of course as many Xen flavors as possible.
So the Novell version of Xen is just an additional opportunity to sell VDI for Citrix.

At the same time the Novell commitment on Xen validates the hypervisor that Citrix is using as main foundation, keeping developers and customers engaged, and Citrix has all the interest to not disrupt it.
The increasing focus that Novell has on KVM must be clarified before customers start to think that yet another vendor (after Red Hat) is abandoning Xen.
This is probably why the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby offered a surprising insight about the value and shortcomings of KVM, the reason behind the Novell and Red Hat decision to invest on it, and the increasing interest for Oracle VM:

…

It's important to realize that for a Linux vendor, KVM significantly simplifies the engineering, testing and packaging of the distro. KVM is a driver in the kernel, whereas Xen, even with paravirt_ops support in the Linux kernel, requires the vendor to pick a particular release of Xen and its tool stack, and then integrate that with a specific kernel.org kernel, and exhaustively test them together - rather than just getting a pre-integrated kernel and hypervisor from kernel.org. So it is entirely reasonable to expect that over time the distros will focus on KVM as a hypervisor. I think KVM is extremely powerful in this context. But ultimately the choice depends on how the end-user wants to acquire/consume virtualization.

If the use case involves the customer buying, installing and running Linux to achieve virtualization, KVM will eventually do a fine job. If on the other hand, the user expects to deploy a virtualization platform that is entirely guest OS agnostic, using a complete virtual infrastructure platform then a type-1 hypervisor that is OS agnostic (xen.org Xen Cloud Platform, Citrix XenServer, OracleVM, VMware vSphere) is what they will go for. I have previously made the case that OS-bundled hypervisors have both inherent advantages and disadvantages in penetrating the market: The opportunity is to supplant the existing OS footprint with a new version of the OS that includes virtualization. The disadvantage is that no OS vendor has yet done a good job of virtualizing its competitors' products, and indeed strategically is never likely to do so. Let's be blunt: thus far they have done a mediocre job at best…

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, KVM, Novell, Xen

Just in case you missed it, XenServer is now open source.
It’s confirmed by the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby, who answered a question about this topic on virtualization.info.

Citrix XenServer is a commercial implementation of the Xen open source hypervisor, as much as Oracle VM Server and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Xen.
XenSource, the company which sponsored the Xen project in its early days and that developed XenServer, has been acquired by Citrix in August 2007 for $500M.

Citrix first decided to give away XenServer for free (February 2009) and then announced its plan to release it as open source (October 2009).

The source code is now part of the XenServer 5.5 Update 2 download package that is available online.
To see the source code ISOs you have to log on:

As expected, the source code doesn’t include XenCenter, the XenServer management interface, which is a Microsoft .NET client GUI, and the hearbeat component required for the High Availability feature.

The open source version of XenServer is the foundation of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) that was unveiled in August 2009.
In his comment on virtualization.info, Crosby clarified that Citrix will first contribute to the hypervisor code that is part of the XCP, and then will derive from it future versions of XenServer (like the imminent codename Midnight Ride).

The question is: what Oracle and Novell will do with their own implementations of Xen now?

Update: The source code ISOs are also available without registration here.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

Fedora, the Linux operating system supported by Red Hat, will reach version 13 in May 2010, and will introduce a number of new features to enrich the KVM capabilities:

• Hostinfo
  Allow a virtual machine to see information and statistics from the host operating system, under narrow and strictly controlled conditions and only at the discretion of the host administrator.
• KVM Stable PCI Addresses
  Allow devices in KVM guest virtual machines to retain the same PCI address allocations as other devices are added or removed from the guest configuration.
  (this is particularily important for Windows guests in order to prevent warnings or reactivation when device addresses change)
• Shared Network Interface
  Enable guest virtual machines to share a physical network interface (NIC) with other guests and the host operating system. This allows guests to independently appear on the same network as the host machine.
• VHostNet
  Enable kernel acceleration for kvm networking.
• VirtAppliances
  Extend support for virtual appliances in management tools.
• VirtAuthorization
  Configuration of fine grained authorization for remote virtual machine management services.
• VirtVNCResourceTunnel
  Provide client access to guest resources such as the serial console, and sound card output, by tunnelling over the VNC connection.
• VirtioSerial
  This feature modifies the current single-port virtio-console device to guests running on top of qemu and kvm. It exposes multiple ports to the guest in the form of simple char devices for simple IO between the guest and host userspaces. It also allows for multiple such devices to be exposed, lifting the current single device restriction.
• Xen to KVM Migration
  Provide nearly effortless automatic translation of Xen virtual machines to KVM virtual machines.
• Xen pvops Dom0
  Dom0 support for pvops-based kernel to support hosting of Xen guests which has been lacking since Fedora 8.
  (currently Fedora releases 11 and 12 contain Xen hypervisor and tools, but Xen dom0 capable kernel is missing)

Of course many of them may be included in the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which gives a good idea of how the KVM platform will evolve.

Thanks to linux-kvm.com for the news.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, Xen

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced in August 2009, is the Citrix answer to the VMware vCloud initiative that a few hosting providers are implementing worldwide.

The first XCP implementation (version 0.1) emerged in November 2009.

This week the Xen.org community announced a little step forward which moves the platform to version 0.1.1, which includes a number of improvements.
The platform is on based on Xen 3.4.2 and its Dom0 is now based on CentOS 5.4.

The most important news anyway is that the team expects to deliver the alpha no later than early February.
It’s a good news but at this pace customers won’t have anything concrete (like a XCP 1.0 GA) before next year. And considering that the VMware partners have frozen their vCloud Express implementations in an “unlimited beta” status, maybe we should all reconsider the idea that 2010 is the year of private clouds. More likely 2012.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, Xen

With a very brief note, The Xen.org community announces that Xen reached the Release Candidate status and so it’s near its general availability, expected before the end of Q1 2010.

There’s a long list of reasons to wait for Xen 4.0.
One of them is the support for the software switch called Open Virtual Switch that will compete with the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

More importantly, the availability of Xen 4.0 may trigger a major launch of Oracle in the virtualization space (assuming its acquisition of Sun will be ever approved) and clarify its strategy against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

In the same way, it will be extremely interesting to see how Citrix will enhance the Xen 4.0 codebase to make XenServer more competitive.

Labels: Xen

Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots:

When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM'sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an 'Off-line Coalesce' tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.

Labels: Citrix, Releases, Xen

There’s much interest around the new major release of Xen because of the rich roadmap that has been proposed and published this summer.

Now we community has a tentative release schedule: January/February 2010.

The news was given by Keir Fraser, Senior Architect at Citrix, during his speech at the Xen Summit in Asia just a few days ago.

Fraser also told that the Xen.org team plans to maintain two branches (3.4.x and 4.x) until the new one is mature enough for the switchover and that a new major release is planned every six-nine months.

Labels: Xen

Google didn’t release yet its lightweight operating system for netbooks, Chrome OS, and many people already rushed to customize the early source code to create fully-functional images that can boot inside a virtual machine or on real hardware.

One of these early experiments is particularly interesting for the virtualization community because it modifies the Chromium OS open source code to include Xen.

The one that released this project, called ChromiumOS64, is Teo En Ming, who hacked the code to support 64bit platforms (the Google code only supports 32bit architectures at the moment because it targets Intel Atom CPUs that powers most netbooks) and integrate Xen 3.4.3 RC1.

This 64bit Xen-powered Chromium OS build is able to run Windows virtual machines (from XP to 7, including Server 2000, 2003 and 2008) as long as the physical CPU has Intel VT-x or AMD-V.
It even supports I/O virtualization as long as the CPU has Intel VT-d and the PCI Express graphic card has its drivers included in the build.

Of course the project is available for free and you can even run in from a USB thumb drive.

Labels: Xen

In late November the FreeBSD team released FreeBSD 8.0.

It finally introduces the experimental support for the Xen domU. This means that FreeBSD 8.0 can run as a (32bit only) Xen guest operating system.

FreeBDS 8.0 also introduce a new experimental feature called “vimage” as part of its OS virtualization technology “jail”, which partitions the network stack.

The vimage jail has its own loopback interface and a separated network stack that includes routing tables. The vimage network interfaces can be moved between different vimage jails and outside of them.

Labels: Xen

At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing technologies, Citrix didn’t disclose much more.

Now the things are getting cleaver, with the Xen.org entity detailing the list of proposed components for XCP 1.0 and makes available the platform for download:

• Latest Xen 3.4.1
• Linux 2.6.27 Kernel
• Windows PV Drivers, Microsoft Certified (Binary Only)
• XAPI Enterprise-class Management Tool Stack (web based management interface)
• VM Lifecycle: Live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
• Resource Pools: Safe live relocation, auto configuration, DR
• Host Configuration: Flexible storage management, networking, power management
• Event Tracking: Progress, notification
• Secure Communication using SSL
• Upgrade and Patching Capabilities
• Real-time Performance Monitoring and Alerting
• Basic SR-IOV Support
• CDROM and Network Host Installer
• Full Featured “xe” CLI and web services API

Xen.org also published a tentative roadmap for version 1.0:

• vSwitch Integration - first step to enabling multi-tenant network infrastructure, to enable firewall and routing rules to follow VMs as they migrate, and to enable flexible traffic monitoring of virtual ports
• Netchannel 2 Integration - improve scalability of xen networking on larger systems and to accelerate inter-VM traffic
• SR-IOV Networking - Although Xen support SR-IVO NICs today, configuration requires manual steps. By extending the control strack we can make SR-IOV simply a transparent optimization that is enabled automatically where possible
• Booting guests from SR-IOV HBAs
• Libvirt bindings
• Native support for OVF in the tool stack
• Drive DMTF standards for virtualization and cloud
• Smart error recovery to minimize impact of hardware errors
• Work closely with other projects and vendors to enable web-based mutli-tenant mgmt and provisioning; e.g. Eucalyptus, Enomaly, OpenNebula, etc.
• Increased management scalability for dealing with 1,000s of Xen hosts - federation of resource pools
• Aggregation of cheap local storage - integrated drdb/parallax
• OCFS2 integration

Labels: Citrix, Xen

The article virtualization.info published just last week about Citrix joining the The Linux Foundation generated a lot of interest and comments.
Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, personally answered a few readers about the reasons behind the value of a free XenServer and the strategy behind it.

In doing so Crosby disclosed very interesting information. First he claimed that XenServer costs to VMware $300MM per year in lost revenue, probably a Citrix internal projection considering its current market share.

Much more important than that, today Crosby candidly unveiled that Citrix is about to fully open source XenServer.
You read right: the company CTO is not talking about Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community. He’s talking about its commercial implementation, XenServer, where Citrix invested so far, that is offered as a free product since February and that the Burton Group considered as enterprise-ready as VMware ESX.

Here’s his full answer that contains the breaking news:

XenServer is 100% free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capabiliy, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes form Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head to head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present.

Crosby further confirmed his words after the comment above.

This move may or may not increase the Citrix market share, and may or may not oblige VMware to drop the price of ESX earlier than expected.
virtualization.info will publish additional details as soon as they are available.

Meanwhile it’s worth considering what Oracle and Novell will do after this will be formalized.
Both companies have their own implementations of Xen, and both are working to release more sophisticated platforms that offer the same features that XenServer offer today.
If Citrix gives away the code, does it make any sense for Oracle and Novell to continue their own development of the hypervisor?

It will also be interesting to see if this move will generate more virtualization players, as it makes so much cheaper and easier to enter the virtualization market by focusing just on the management layer.

Update: Citrix reached out virtualization.info to add an official statement to this move:

XenServer is offered to the community as the basis for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).  There will be substantial additional contributions coming from other community partners, but we aim to make all of our technology in XenServer (other than XenCenter, which is a stateless Microsoft .NET client GUI and therefore not appropriate for the XCP community and its intention to make a great cloud platform for large scale clouds to consume and automate using their automation and management systems) available to the community in OSS. 

Other features will come in too, like the Open vSwitch, and we will drive from there to develop additional storage repositories and so on.  But the key emphasis is the use of XCP as a platform for the entire community, with a starting point, for which we have offered the code base of XenServer. 

Key partners such as VA Linux, Oracle, Novell, Fujitsu and Intel and AMD are all committed to the ongoing delivery of additional value to the platform, which will therefore have multiple routes to market, a strong ISV community and hopefully deliver revenue to a broad sector of the market.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

In 2007, when Citrix, one of Microsoft's strongest allies, acquired XenSource, a startup whose success depends on an open source product (the Xen hypervisor), nobody really believed the move would benefit the community in any way.

The major concerns were that, over time, Citrix would abandon the development of Xen to focus on a proprietary hypervisor, that Citrix could try to influence the Xen development to provide an indirect advantage to Microsoft and/or that Citrix could use its influence on the Xen project to damage all the competitors that were relying on it (at that time Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Oracle).

After the XenSource acquisition, some major vendors (Red Hat and IBM for example) and individual contributors lost interest in the Xen project and started to focus on KVM (IBM effort, Red Hat effort). Possibly because of this relationship between Citrix and Microsoft, possibly because Citrix has never been an open source champion.
Of course VMware did all its best to facilitate the exodus from the Xen project.

virtualization.info is unable to exactly track or measure the Citrix contributions to the Xen project since the XenSource acquisition, which made progresses in the last two years and has an impressive roadmap.
People more informed on this aspect are welcome to comment to the post with details.

For sure Citrix approached the open source world from different angles: it invested in the networking vendor Vyatta, which competes against Cisco an open source software router; it’s behind the development of the first open source virtual switch for virtual infrastructures, the Open Virtual Switch, and now it’s supporting the creation of an open source cloud computing platform, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

Whatever the company has done so far, it was not enough to convince Linus Torvalds and the other Linux maintainers to include Xen in the kernel, side by side with KVM.
It seems like just a technical issue, but maybe it’s more than that.

The Citrix new move to the open source world is joining the Linux Foundation.

The official reason behind this move is to ensure that the Linux operating system works the best inside its XCP cloud and in the upcoming client hypervisor XenClient:

“The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaborative work on requirements for Linux and complementary projects such as the Xen Project, Xen Client hypervisor Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) initiative,” said Ian Pratt, founder and chair of Xen.org and vice president of Advanced Products at Citrix Systems. “Citrix has joined the Linux Foundation both in its role as leader of the Xen Project and because it ships commercial products based on Xen.”

In addition to developing the Xen hypervisor, the Xen community is working on the development of complete client hypervisor and cloud virtualization platform products, which incorporate Linux as an embedded, secure, optimized run time for the Virtual Machine Monitor. The Xen community also develops open source technology to permit Linux to run with optimal performance on other hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server.

Anyway, it’s probably safe to speculate that more than anything else, Citrix wants to see Xen shipped out-of-the-box with every Linux distribution in the market. And becoming a Linux Foundation member may be the first step to achieve the task.

Labels: Alliances, Citrix, Xen

In June VMLogix announced the upcoming availability of a special version of its virtual lab automation product that could support Amazon EC2.

The product, dubbed LabManager Cloud Edition (CE), was released two weeks ago at VMworld 2009.

While the privacy and security concerns expressed in our previous coverage remain, it is true that VMLogix may be one of the first vendors to set the trend for the coming months: those customers that decide to embrace cloud computing may easily recognize the need for management consoles that extend the 3rd party IaaS architectures to achieve specific tasks such as virtual lab automation.

There are evident benefits:

The position of VMLogix as an acquisition target becomes more and more interesting.
Citrix, which already has an OEM agreement with them to distribute LabManager as part of Essential, for sure must be extremely pleased to see how VMLogix is proficient in manipulating Xen-based cloud computing facilities.

Labels: Amazon, Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix, Xen

Earlier this week Amazon announced its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering, a segmented version of its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) that is accessible only through a VPN connection.

There were at least a couple of reasons to launch VPC right now: sure, it is the 3rd anniversary of EC2, but most of all it’s the week before VMworld, the VMware conference that this year is going to have a major focus on cloud computing.

Both Xen.org and VMware will in fact launch two new initiatives called Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and VMware vCloud Express.

XCP will be a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, to extend the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. And it will be supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board members, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle.

So the Xen Cloud Platform will merge together new and existing pieces of software in a single package even if it’s not clear at the moment what will be part of the platform exactly.

For sure XCP will include support for the DMFT existing and upcoming standards: the OVF  to load virtual machines from any 3rd party hypervisor (Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, etc.) and to migrate them across federated clouds, and the upcoming VMAN interface.
The VMAN support alone won’t be enough to grant a seamless migration from a private virtual data center to a public or private XCP cloud, so it’s very likely that the platform will support some virtual machines live migration capabilities.

XCP will also integrate the just surfaced Open vSwitch, an open source virtual switch which offers features similar to the ones provided by the Cisco Nexus 1000V in VMware vSphere 4.0.

XCP will also feature some advanced storage capabilities that support multi-tenant cloud services, and this mean mean that Citrix will contribute the project by releasing a part of its StorageLink technology as open source.

The presence of standardized interfaces and open components means that any commercial offering could be able to interoperate, extend or manage the Xen Cloud Platform in a not-too-distant future.
And this includes existing clouds like Amazon EC2 or RackSpace Cloud Servers (formerly Mosso) as well as the products offered by any vendor, including VMware.

Of course it’s entirely expected that Citrix will launch a version of its Essential for XCP but we already know for sure that the Xen Cloud Platform will support open source management solutions like Eucalyptus (adopted at NASA) and OpenNebula.

The existence of VMware vCloud Express, was revealed by Forbes just two days ago.
Forbes describes it as a “an easy way to get up and running with vCloud service”, but the moment there are no other news about it.
VMware is expected to formally announce the product early next week.

Labels: Citrix, Cloud Computing, VMware, Xen

When VMware introduced its new cloud computing mantra one year ago, there were at least four reactions: hope, skepticism, irritation and confusion.

Some truly hoped that the data center could become as easy and ubiquitous as the power grid in just a couple of years, as VMware predicted.
Others expressed skepticism (include this site among them) about the chances that such revolution could happen in such short time frame and that it would be of any relevance for the SMBs.
Google got irritated because the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz started his new career by saying that the search giant approach to cloud computing is fundamentally wrong.
And others were just confused by the introduction of public and private clouds.

The public cloud VMware was talking about is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, where virtual machines are provisioned on demand and the customers are billed on a pay-per-use model (it’s much more than that, but these are the two fundamental aspects that everybody keeps in mind).

But what is a private cloud exactly?
Is it a new way, cooler way to call the already cool enough data-center-in-a-box concept where hardware virtualization still is the fundamental piece? 
Or is it a cloud-in-a-cloud solution, where housing meets virtualization?
Or something even different?

Amazon, which offered a IaaS architecture based on Xen for two years, just offered its answer: it’s called Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and it basically is a private segment within its popular Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) facility, which customers reach through a VPN connection.

RightScale, an Amazon partner on this new evolution of EC2, gives some additional details on how this VPC can be configured by the customers.

VCP is available just as limited beta right now but it already is another huge milestone for Xen.
The more Amazon expands EC2 and attracts new customers the more companies will recognize in EC2 the “default” choice for public and private IaaS solutions, and the more credibility will be transferred to those virtualization vendors that are using Xen: Citrix and Oracle.

VMware knows that and this is why it is investing in Terremark and why it is acquiring SprintSource: VMware has to build something that can rival with Amazon EC2 if it wants to keep up the perception that vSphere is cloud-ready.

Labels: Amazon, Xen

In May, during its main conference Synergy, Citrix announced the existence of an open source virtual switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V that Cisco made available for VMware vSphere.

In early June, the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby shared a very few details about it, but so far most of the virtualization community doesn’t know much about it. But the official website about the project quietly appeared online now: the product is called Open vSwitch and is released under the Apache 2 open source license.

The first release (which is almost complete and available online as well) is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:

• Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN
• Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
• Per VM policing
• NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing
• Kernel-based forwarding
• Support for OpenFlow
• Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
  (The Open vSwitch can be even used inside a plain Linux distribution in place of operating system bridge)

On top of that the following features are part of the roadmap:

• User-space forwarding engine
• sFlow
• Compatibility layer for VDE
• Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation)
• Full L3 support + NAT
• Priority-based QoS
• More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NetFlow)
• 802.1x/RADIUS
• Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)

The version available online is near the 1.0 (0.90.4), but it’s only available as source code.
The online documentation already explains how to use it with a XenServer 5.5 host.

Labels: Citrix, KVM, Xen

In June Xen reached version 3.4 introducing out-of-the-box support for Hyper-V and a series of enhancements that will make the platform a good client hypervisor.

At the beginning of this month Xen further progressed to version 3.4.1, which is just a maintenance release, but the truly interesting things are in the Xen 4.0 roadmap (with our emphasis):

• RDMA Live Migration Support
• Dom0 kernel in Linux 2.6.30 or later
• Dom0 support for Marvell 6480 disk driver
• Pass through USB-Controllers/Devices for PV Guests
• Fault Tolerance - Project Remus and/or Kemari
• Monitor, Limit, Control network traffic coming at DomUs
• Internationalization / Unicode Support
• Configure Virtual Bridge like Real Switch (e.g. Control VLAN, port status)
• VLan tagging per NIC in the VM Config File
• Virtual Ethernet Switch
• Physical Xen boot/install support via native UEFI (pUEFI) and virtual UEFI (vUEFI) support
• Limit I/O for individual disks of VM (similar to credit scheduler weight)
• Dynamic Memory Management for Overcommiting RAM
• PCI CGA Passthrough for VT-d (vendor cards like Nvidia, AIT, etc)
• Full AMD IOMMU Support
• Online resizing of DomU Disks
• Cross compliling Xen and Modular Builds

On top of this very interesting list, Ian Pratt, the Xen CTO (and Xen.org Chairman and XenSource Founder and Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products), informally indicated a few areas where contributors are welcome. And in this list there’s a lot of precious details there (our emphasis again):

• Xen will soon be including the openflow vswitch developed under the openvswitch.org project. In order to integrate support for SR-IOV network hardware, we need a special kind of bond driver in the guest that initially routes traffic via the vswitch, but then can receive instructions from the vswitch to route individual flows to the direct hardware path (falling back to the normal software path via the vswitch if the SR-IOV VF gets unplugged).
• Build on some of the existing work done in Cambridge to use Tungsten Graphics Gallium as a device-independent and API-independent 3D remoting protocol.
• Get the blkback/netback drivers working in a HVM guest, effectively allowing domain0 to optionally be a HVM guest.
• Fully implement domain0 restartability, effectively enabling a dom0 reboot or upgrade without rebooting the rest of the system. (There’s been plenty of work done on this already, but it needs finishing off)
• investigate how a hypervisor could best use large amount of NAND FLASH memory. (not just via a disk API, but as native FLASH)
• Deterministic replay for xen. (see the University of Michigan papers).
• work on the ARM xen port to get it to the same level as the x86 port
• implement UBC Remus for HVM guests and integrate it into the main Xen tree.
• virtualize a GPU in a device-dependent fashion (everyone has been doing it in a device-independent fashion, but there may be big performance and fidelity wins to be had doing it in a device-specific fashion). Since the Intel GPU drivers are open source it should be possible to do this on Intel GPUs.
• Extend Cambridge/UBC Parallax to implement content-addressable hashing to save disk space
• Switch the PV SCSI over to using the netchannel2 ring protocol for improved performance.

Only three major virtualization vendors are currently relying on Xen: Citrix, Oracle and Novell.
Each one will try to innovate with enterprise-grade capabilities to be added on top of this “basic” feature-set.
Customers can can now have a better idea of where the three companies are going. The only problem is that none of them is probably ready to share some release dates for some or all the features above.

Labels: Releases, Xen

For a long time a number of contributors sponsored by Red Hat worked on a virtualization interface that could standardize the way hypervisors are managed, getting rid of the differences between vendors’ implementations.

The API is called libvirt and it’s around since early 2006.

Red Hat has a strong commitment on it, at the point that its imminent KVM-based virtualization offering is based on its, as announced in June 2008.
This is why the API is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) which allows the inclusion in any commercial product.

Through libvirt, a management platform running on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or even Windows can already control both Xen, KVM, Sun VirtualBox, Parallels OpenVZ, QEMU, LXC and User Mode Linux (UML). But the best has yet to come.

The just released version 0.7.0 includes a number of remarkable new features, including support for the IBM POWER hypervisor and what seems a first attempt to support VMware ESX.

Of course this doesn’t mean that VMware will allow a product using libvirt to manage its flagship hypervisor without buying vCenter Server.
But for sure it means that in a near future Red Hat may be able to offer what Microsoft already offer with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM): the capability to control multiple hypervisors through a single management console. And this may be extremely appealing for some of those customers that already purchased vCenter.

Labels: KVM, Red Hat, VMware, Xen

Xen.org recently published a revamped edition of its official training slide deck titled Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Unfortunately the 154 slides don’t have footnotes and there’s no audio, but it’s still a welcome effort to simplify the evangelization of the hypervisor that powers half the virtualization platforms available on the market (Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM Server/Virtual Iron).

Labels: Training, Xen

Oracle continues to stay mum about its integration plan for Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron hypervisors, but don’t hold anything when it’s time to talk about the new competitors.

Just two months ago the company dismissed the VMware virtual appliance initiative and its Marketplace, saying that it doesn’t contain anything but toy appliances.
One month later Oracle decided to clarify how the word co-opetition is not in its vocabulary, modifying the support policy to exclude every virtualization vendor that offer a hypervisor for x86/x64 architectures.

Today it’s time to hit Red Hat (and by some degrees Novell).
On its corporate blog last week Oracle highlighted its commitment to Xen and the open source:

…Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries…

The key point of this apparently candid post is about the quality of support that only Oracle can offer.
To support the statement Oracle points to another article about the reasons behind the launch of Oracle Unbreakable Linux:

Oracle Unbreakable Linux launched two years ago as a support program for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) implementations or for new Oracle Enterprise Linux implementations. Oracle Unbreakable Linux program is about enterprise-class support that customers can't get (or is not available) from Red Hat.

…

Oracle brings the highest support quality, more value, and proven business practices to Linux support, including the following items Red Hat can't:

• 7500+ professionals providing 24x7, global support in over 145 countries
• Lifetime support policy (7+ years of general product support with the ability to extend to unlimited number of years)
• Premier backporting (Request backport of specific features eliminating pressure to upgrade with every update release)

…Due to dissatisfaction with Red Hat's quality of support as well as a desire to get more value, many users have switched from Red Hat Support to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support…

The message is specifically directed to Red Hat because Red Hat is the company that promoted Xen for years and then decided a complete U turn by replacing the open source hypervisor with KVM.

Red Hat will (re)start competing with the other virtualization players in September when its new offering will become finally available.
And before any customer even think about jumping on the KVM bandwagon, Oracle wants to make sure that everybody knows how much better they are at support.

Labels: KVM, Oracle, Red Hat, Xen

Yes, Oracle is slowly increasing the frequency of its incursions in the virtualization world.
Now that the company controls three hypervisors (its own Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron) it’s expected that a master plan comes out sooner or later.

For now Oracle just shows a little piece of it, by announcing its paravirtualized (PV) drivers for Windows guest OSes.

Oracle offers them for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as for Windows XP and Vista. For each one there’s a 32bit and a 64bit version. Of course they are only available for the Oracle VM hypervisor.

The paravirtualized drivers improves the performance of virtual machines when there’s no chance to leverage the capabilities of hardware-assisted virtualization technologies like AMD-V RVI (available in the Quad-Core Opteron CPUs since September 2007) and Intel EPT (available in the new Xeon 5500 CPUs).

While enhancing the performance of Windows guest OSes, the PV drivers that Oracle is shipping also imply some limitations: once installed them, the virtual machines state can’t be saved and restore anymore and live migration is no more available.

It’s interesting to note how different is the current Oracle approach compared to the one of its new subsidiary Virtual Iron.
Exactly three years ago Virtual Iron announced its intention to stop the development of PV drivers:

…Paravirtualization requires substantial engineering efforts in modifying and maintaining an operating system. However, these heroic efforts are inevitably losing the battle against Moore's Law and hardware advances being made in the x86 space. By the time the first product with paravirtualization appears on the market, more than 80% of the shipping x86 server processors from Intel and AMD will have hardware-based virtualization acceleration integrated into the chips (Intel-VT and AMD-V or "Rev-F"). This hardware-based acceleration is designed to optimize pure virtualization performance, primarily the virtualization of CPU, and it renders OS paravirtualization efforts as completely unnecessary and behind the technology curve…

Update: As some comments below highlighted, the last point in this article, about the divergence of opinions between Oracle and Virtual Iron on paravirtualization is wrong.

In 2006 Virtual Iron was rejecting the idea of running fully paravirtualized guest OSes (which requires kernel patching). 
Oracle is not taking a different approach. It’s just releasing paravirtualized drivers to speed the I/O operations, something that all the other virtualization vendors do as well through guest OS packages that customers are recommended to install (like the VMware Tools).

Labels: Oracle, Xen

The Xen.org community and Citrix are arranging an interesting event for late June in Berlin called Xen Direction Europe 2009.

Compared to the well-known Xen Summits, this seems easier to understand for somebody that is not a Xen hacker (read: it contains more marketing material) but no less interesting as the agenda includes some presentations that are probably worth the visit like:

• Virtualization - it's not just for servers anymore Intel
• Highly available virtual infrastructures based on Xen Lufthansa Systems
• HXEN: Hosted Xen Hypervisor Project Citrix

Of course the last one is especially interesting as it will cover the progress of the new hosted VMM architecture that will power a Citrix product called XenWorkstation, at least accordingly to the virtualization.info sources.

One session promises to be very funny (underline is ours):
Virtualization of mission-critical deployments Oracle with Xen: Oracle users choose Oracle VM
Like the Oracle users have a real chance.

Labels: Citrix, Events, Xen

It doesn’t matter if we are talking about SaaS, PaaS or IaaS architectures. Customers have many reasons to not trust the cloud computing solutions that the market offers today and one of them is the lack of security.

Amazon has the oldest, most popular and very likely the largest cloud infrastructure existing today, and thus it must under continuous fire when enterprise customers evaluate its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

The company recently announced a series of initiatives to make EC2, S3 and the other Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities more secure, and to clarify the level of security currently in place:

• Certifications and Accreditations
  AWS is actively seeking the appropriate security certifications and accreditations in order to provide our customers with additional confidence in our infrastructure. In addition, we will continue to publish guidance on how AWS enables customers to build applications that are compliant with standards, such as HIPAA.
• Physical Security
  Amazon has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating large-scale data centers. AWS infrastructure is housed in Amazon-controlled data centers throughout the world. Only those within Amazon who have a legitimate business need to have such information know the actual location of these data centers, and the data centers themselves are secured with a variety of physical barriers to prevent unauthorized access.
• Secure Services
  Each of the services within the AWS cloud is architected to be secure and contains a number of capabilities that restrict unauthorized access or usage without sacrificing the flexibility that customers demand. For more information about the security capabilities of each service in the AWS cloud, consult the Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes whitepaper.
• Data Privacy
  AWS enables users to encrypt their personal or business data within the AWS cloud and publishes backup and redundancy procedures for services so that customers can gain greater understanding of how their data flows throughout AWS. For more information on the data privacy and backup procedures for each service in the AWS cloud, consult the Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes whitepaper.

We’ll see if the effort will produce a security compliant cloud computing infrastructure that enterprise customers can trust. Possibly before the end of the next decade.

Labels: Amazon, Xen

One of the oldest (and hottest) topic in the history of modern virtualization is if the Xen open source hypervisor can be integrated into the Linux kernel or not.

XenSource tried to achieve the goal for years (while VMware did its best to avoid it), but in December 2006 Linus Torvalds announced the decision to include another virtualization platform in place of Xen: KVM.

KVM was developed and maintained by the startup Qumranet, acquired by Red Hat in September 2008, and at that time was just 6 months old, much less mature than Xen.
Despite that and because of its architecture (at least this is the official reason), KVM has been included in the kernel since version 2.6.20 and Xen is not.

After this and after the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, the idea of Xen inside Linux seemed definitively archived. But the community is still debating about the topic.

Torvalds’ comment on the idea is lapidary:

…If Xen was a single driver thing, we wouldn't have this discussion. But as is, Xen craps all over OTHER PEOPLES CODE. When those people then aren't interested in Xen, why is anybody surprised that people aren't excited?

Thanks to c0t0d0s0 for the news.

Labels: KVM, Xen

The open source Xen hypervisor reaches version 3.4 after almost one year of development.

This is an important milestone for the project because of the key features introduced:

• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements
  Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve.
  Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, adds a pretty interesting detail to this point:
  For the first time the Xen project is moving away from providing simply the hypervisor, and leaving it to vendors/users/developers to build their own system.  This release contains the whole enchilada, including Dom0, the management tool stack and Xen.  In other words, everything you need to be up and running with a Xen client system.
• Reliability – Availability - Serviceability (RAS)
  Xen 3.4 delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.
• Power Management
  Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.
• Support for the Hyper-V enlightenment interface

The XCI components are critical for all those vendors that are working to offer a client hypervisor (including Citrix, Phoenix Technologies, Virtual Computer and Neocleus) but of course the most interesting new feature is the out-of-the-box support for the closed-source brother of Xen, Hyper-V.

From now on it will be specially interesting to see how the Xen roadmap evolves, considering that only three major players are using the hypervisor: Citrix, Novell and Oracle (which now includes both Sun and Virtual Iron).

Labels: Microsoft, Xen

It doesn’t matter if you are a loyal customer of VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. Anytime one of these three vendors (or any other in the market) mentions its effort in the cloud computing space using virtualization the comparison term is Amazon.

Amazon has been the first to develop a general purpose cloud computing infrastructure and offer it to the general public. The company launched the (beta) service in August 2006, adopting the open source hypervisor Xen as virtualization engine of choice.
So far their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is the biggest and most mature Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture existing on the market.

During the last three years Citrix acquired XenSource, the leading company for the Xen project, and released the commercial implementation of Xen, XenServer, free of charge.
Amazon doesn’t reveal anything about its Xen implementation, but it’s same to assume that the company engineers had to develop a lot of tools and features on top of Xen.
Now the company can have for free enterprise management, virtual machines live migration, resource sharing, integrated storage management and, at the same time, can count on the enterprise support that Citrix now offers.
This must be a tempting proposition to lower the EC2 maintenance costs.

If, in the future, Amazon wants to use EC2 to develop massive virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and offer hosted desktops in the consumer market, Citrix is ready, as they are about to release a client hypervisor based on Xen, XenClient, for free as well.

So how long before Amazon moves from Xen to XenServer on EC2?

Maybe not so much: last week at the Synergy conference (which co-hosted the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009) Citrix announced a new partnership with Amazon to offer and support part of its products on the EC2 virtual machines.

As Richard Jones, VP of Data Center Strategies at Burton Group, said on his corporate blog:

The announcement on May 6th at Synergy of Citrix-Amazon collaboration on internal/external cloud interoperability has “we’re moving to Citrix XenServer as our EC2 hypervisor infrastructure” written all over it.

Labels: Amazon, Citrix, Xen

Earlier this week SDTimes published a brief coverage of the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco last week.

A very brief note in the article highlights a remarkable information:

For the virtualization crowd, Zemlin [Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation] said that, moving forward, the Linux Foundation is encouraging vendors and developers to standardize on KVM, not Xen.

If true this may be the confirmation that the Citrix acquisition of XenServer has compromised the relation with the open source community, despite Citrix is giving back.

It’s interesting to note that the Red Hat acquisition of Qumranet, which developed and maintains KVM, didn’t have the same impact.

Labels: KVM, Xen

In early March virtualization.info broke the news that Citrix was about to release a hosted version (aka type-2 virtual machine monitor) of of XenServer, called XenWorkstation, that could compete with VMware Workstation, Parallels Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC, VirtualBox and so on.

There are good reasons for Citrix to do so, and the impressive number of visits we received on that article confirms a great interest about such product.

XenWorkstation was not launched the week of March 9 as we speculated.
While some people (including ones that claim to be Citrix employees) reported that this product doesn’t exist, our sources tells us that Citrix decided to postpone its launch.

True or not (virtualization.info long time readers know that our sources are very reliable), Citrix just released to the Xen community the open source code of a type-2 VMM version of Xen, currently called KXen.

The virtualization platform supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (all 32bit) as host OSes.
64bit of these Windows versions will be supported soon, as well as Mac OS X.

Please note that the KXen code is a snapshot of the Xen code base used in XenServer today.
Future versions of this product will be based on Xen 3.4 and following.

The code is available here: Windows version / Linux version.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

In 2006 the ConVirt team started an ambitious project: develop an open source, multi-host management console for Xen.
Initially called XenMan, the tool was then renamed ConVirt and its roadmap was enriched with several highly desirable features.

Three years later the ConVirt team morphs in a company called Convirture, and ConVirt, still an open source product, finally reached version 1.0 with a notable number of features:

• Support for Xen and KVM
• Support for multi-host virtual infrastructures
• Support for virtual machines snapshot, live migration, backup and decommission
• Support for VMs templates and virtual appliances
• Support for storage usage

The product is available free of charge here.

Labels: Convirture, KVM, Xen

Normally virtualization.info doesn’t cover customers case histories but in this case we’ll make an exception.

SAP as a software is one of the most important mission-critical applications in the world.
SAP as a company is one of the savviest companies in the industry about virtualization: during 2007, the company fully embraced hardware virtualization, supporting VMware, Xen (both Novell and Red Hat implementations) and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.
They even have a 3-days conference called Virtualization Week.
But most of all SAP is one of the key partner of VMware as the company demonstrated at the recent VMworld Europe 2009, when Paul Maritz granted SAP no less than 30 minutes of his opening keynote.

The fact that SAP is virtualizing around 500 servers with XenServer is remarkable.
It really validates the Citrix hypervisor.

To be fair the press announcement specifically say that XenServer will be used to virtualize the worldwide training centers first and the project management division later, which will P2V migrate hundred of dev/test/support machines.
So SAP is not yet ready to use XenServer for the production environment (or maybe they are but cannot).

Anyway, VMware representatives sometimes say that XenServer is not an enterprise-grade hypervisor. Now they’ll have to explain why one of their best and most trusted partner is going to adopts it so widely.
Is it the price to blame? Or is it that they are overlooking the competition?

Labels: Citrix, SAP, Xen

While a new startup works to unofficially open source the VMware VMFS, Citrix has officially open sourced its implementation of the Microsoft VHD format.

Citrix and Microsoft adopt the same virtual hard drive format since September 2007, when they closed a deal to adopt VHD in all the upcoming products.

In over two years Citrix has developed an optimized implementation of the product and it’s now giving it back to the open source world by submitting its code to the Xen community for inclusion in the hypervisor code base under the BSD license.

If approved, Citrix partners and competitors that adopt Xen (like Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun, etc.) will be able to use it side by side with QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW).

Labels: Citrix, Microsoft, Xen

By now it should be clear that Citrix will do everything possible to keep its leadership in the application virtualization space and increase its relevance in the hardware virtualization space.

The first step was giving away XenServer (with Live Migration, Resource Pools and much more) for free.

The second step will be releasing a free virtualization platform for the desktops: XenWorkstation.

Please note that this has nothing to do with the client hypervisor that Citrix is developing with Intel.
This is a type-2 version (or hosted VMM) of Xen that will run on consumer hardware, exactly like VMware Player/Workstation/Fusion, Parallels Workstation/Desktop, Sun VirtualBox or Microsoft Virtual PC.
And Citrix may release it as soon as next week according to virtualization.info sources.

Xen will run as a kernel module and will be available for Windows and Mac OS X hosts.

A part of the VMware early success depend on Workstation: the product is so good that spread across the world and crawled into the biggest corporations without passing through long enterprise sale.
System and software engineers introduces the culture of VMware inside their companies using Workstation on daily basis for simple tasks: testing a new product or OS, developing code, separating the private and the business workspace, etc.

Citrix badly need to build a reputation in the virtualization community. And a free XenWorkstation may be another good way to do so.

Labels: Citrix, Xen

While virtualization professionals are still trying to figure out how the renewed alliance between Microsoft and EMC will work on virtualization, another major event happens: Red Hat joins the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

Pretty much like Cisco (why Cisco is here?), Citrix, Novell, Oracle, Sun, Unisys (why Unisys is here?), Virtual Iron and VMware did in the last few months (the SVVP was launched in June 2008) now also Red Hat had to accept the Microsoft conditions to offer concrete Windows support to its virtualized customers.
As side benefit, the Microsoft customers finally will be able to run Red Hat guest OSes on their Hyper-V hosts.

The agreement implies that:

• Red Hat will validate Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows 2000 Server SP42, and Windows Server 2008 guests on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies
• Microsoft will validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 guests on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (all editions) and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Note that, as usual, Red Hat is not specifying which virtualization technology will be validated. As their new offering based on KVM is not ready yet, we may safely assume that this agreement is about the implementation of Xen currently part of Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Labels: Microsoft, Red Hat, Xen

While waiting to replace Xen with KVM somewhere in H1 2009, Red Hat continues to improve its current virtualization platform.

In the new Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3, released this week, the company greatly extended the supported Xen limits:

• from 8 to 32 vCPUs
• from 64GB to 80GB vRAM
• from 32 to 126 pCPUs
• from 64GB to 1TB pRAM

Additionally the Xen included in RHEL 5.3 supports the Intel nested paging tables technology EPT featured inside the new Intel Core i7 (codename Nehalem) processors.

Labels: Red Hat, Xen

In October 2008 Amazon finally declared its Xen-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ready for production, introducing a Service Level Agreement, the availability for 32 and 64bit Windows Server 2003 virtual machines, and the support for IIS and SQL Server inside each guest OS.

At that time the company also hinted at a new management console that customers could use to manage their virtual infrastructure in the cloud, but the product remained unveiled until last week.

Simply dubbed Web-based AWS Management Console, the product is a feature-rich control panel that allows to create, launch, find and manage virtual machines (called Amazon Machine Images or AMIs), create and manage volumes and snapshots (called Elastic Block Store or EBS), and even manage the security permissions and the firewall settings.

The product is still in beta but its AJAX interface seems pretty valid and Amazon seems to have created an interface even better than the popular Elasticfox extension for Firefox:

Amazon published a nice webcast about the new console here.

Labels: Amazon, Xen

In November 2007 Oracle decided to enter the virtualization market and announced its own platform: Oracle VM.
The product is based on the open source hypervisor Xen, it’s offered free of charge, and features an enterprise management console called Oracle VM Manager.

So far the product was mainly pushed to those customers that were virtualizing Oracle Database on other platforms (read VMware) so that many potential customers didn’t even notice its presence or didn’t take the offering too seriously.
But the reality is that the company bills Oracle VM as a general purpose hypervisor that supports for many different workloads.

Now Oracle is taking further steps to demonstrate how serious it is in the virtualization market: last week it joined the Xen Advisory Board.

The move has a double effect: on one side it highlights a real commitment to improve the product, on the other it clarifies that there’s no intention to move to KVM.
Somebody in fact speculated that Oracle may want to switch to KVM because its Unbreakable Linux derives from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat is dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

The Oracle appointee is Wim Coekaerts, exactly the man behind Unbreakable Linux.
With him Oracle will send Dan Magenheimer, the leader of the Xen port on Intel Itanium architecture.

Labels: Oracle, Xen

At the recent Xen Summit 2008 in Tokyo a specially interesting project finally reached version 1.0: Kemari.
The project was presented for the first time in April 2007 but only now it reaches a version stable enough to be marked as GA.

Developed by Yoshiaki Tamura, Kemari is a patch for Xen 3.3 that brings host fail-over.
It works with both Linux and Windows guests OSes.

A briefly description tells enough to understand how it works:

Kemari in VMM taps event channel, pauses the guest (not suspend), prepares for transfer, and Kemari in userland transfers the guest. On failover, Kemari on the secondary restores the guest, and the backend drivers in dom0 set up the backend rings from the state of the shared rings in the guest

Here a video where a Windows XP virtual machines survives the shut down of one node in a hardware cluster of two:

The exiting news is that Kemari is now part of the Xen roadmap, and this means that the open source hypervisor may offer out-of-the-box fault tolerance as soon as it hits version 3.4.
Citrix will be probably very happy. We wonder if Marathon Technologies will be happy as well.

Labels: Tools, Xen