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