Xen, Citrix and Microsoft

Post by **dann** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:12 pm

I was reading through these two articles:

http://blogs.eweek.com/epiphanies/conte ... pened.html

and

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2171434,00.asp

And thought to myself, hmmm... This may not be that great. I'm somewhat familar with Xen, but have never actually used it (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen for more information). I am also not clear on the history, but I do know the Xen Hypervisor has been released under the GPL and XenSource does provide a proprietary product based on the open version under XenSource. That said, since Citrix has now acquired XenSource and there is rumor that MS will acquire Citrix; what does that pose to the future of Xen? They cannot revoke the GPL'd version of Xen but they can fork it and make it incompatible. Or make it so that Windows will only run on their version of Xen.

Again, I'm not sure about the amount of community participation in Xen, but it stinks that a company like MS can just come along and buy up all that hard work and have the potential to not necessarily give anything back. Who knows, maybe they will be responsible caretakers and contributors to the project and we will all benefit. Maybe I am way off base.

Maybe I should just get back to work.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 6:58 pm

I doubt it, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. MS won't be able to buy the open sourced portions, in any case. Also, lots and lots of stink lately about how Xen is really the wrong approach, and that KVM si teh r0xx0rz. I have no idea, personally, since I don't use either.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:39 am

With chips with Virtualization , kvm is a hell lot easier to setup, load the module and substitute kvm every time you use qemu.

ie in qemu : qemu -m 256 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d edgy.img
kvm : kvm -m 256 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d edgy.img

The only time you use original qemu commands is when creating/converting images.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 8:42 am

allix wrote:With chips with Virtualization , kvm is a hell lot easier to setup, load the module and substitute kvm every time you use qemu.

ie in qemu : qemu -m 256 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d edgy.img
kvm : kvm -m 256 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d edgy.img

The only time you use original qemu commands is when creating/converting images.

That may be good for virtualization on workstation level, but is it usable, feasible and scalable for a really large enterprise server environment? I seriously doubt it. Also, you mention that Xen is hard to set up, have you tried using either Red Hat or Novell's management tools made specifically for managing virtualization?

jsusanka · Post by **jsusanka** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 10:53 am

That may be good for virtualization on workstation level, but is it usable, feasible and scalable for a really large enterprise server environment? I seriously doubt it. Also, you mention that Xen is hard to set up, have you tried using either Red Hat or Novell's management tools made specifically for managing virtualization?

totally agree -

I use xen to run some websites - there is something to be said for just running a server on xen and installing only the services you need. sure makes upgrading a heck of a lot easier along with disaster recovery.

I use debian/ubuntu and use deboostrap to create the initial xen images.
I just feel like it was better for me because it gave me more control.
but I do like redhat's tools for creating images. when I tried suse's they didn't work at the time so I can't really say anything about their tools.

they will create a fork probably just like apple will probably create a fork of cups. I don't know if it is a bad or good thing but it is what it is and time will tell I guess. But as long as there is a gpl version I think it will be safe and will always live on.

allix · Post by **allix** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 2:26 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote: That may be good for virtualization on workstation level, but is it usable, feasible and scalable for a really large enterprise server environment? I seriously doubt it. Also, you mention that Xen is hard to set up, have you tried using either Red Hat or Novell's management tools made specifically for managing virtualization?

KVM is fairly new compared to xen,give it some chance before ignoreing it. In regard to red hats virtualizations tools, you told me you do not like going through vnc with xen to get a desktop and that FreeBSD jails was easy

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 3:57 pm

allix wrote:KVM is fairly new compared to xen,give it some chance before ignoreing it.

Yeah, however despite this, I doubt you're gonna see KVM running on Mainframes!

allix wrote:In regard to red hats virtualizations tools, you told me you do not like going through vnc with xen to get a desktop

Yeah, I don't really like VNC, if I were to use Xen for desktop virtualization I'd probably use a remote X session to get access to it. That or X11 forwarding over SSH (ssh -X 10.1.2.3).

allix wrote:and that FreeBSD jails was easy

They are! However, FreeBSD jails are better qualified as "isolation through light virtualization".