Kris Buytaert

The Future of Xen At Red Hat

October 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

As you might know, most of the development for the upcoming Red Hat releases is happening in the Fedora project, so if you want to keep an eye on what’s going to happen in future RedHat releases Fedora is a good place to look.

Reuven pointed out that the next Fedora release (Fedora 10) won’t have Dom0 support.

This however is not yet the strategic decision from Redhat after buying Qumranet and thus KVM. But merely a lack of time before the release has to ship.

Xen typically is being developed with an older 2.6.18 Linux kernel release and forward porting of these features is a time consuming effort. The typical kernel-xen package in Fedora has always been a bit behind on the kernel package
So the slow introduction of paravirt_ops, is keeping Dom0 support out of Fedora 10.

The idea behind paravirt_ops is to build a kernel structure that gives an interface to a virtualization layer, any virtualization layer, it allows the kernel to run on both a hypervisor and the actual hardware. Initial support for Xen, VMware and KVM is available.

Today running Fedora 10 as a host for your virtual machines will give you KVM as your only option. However Fedora 11 should solve that problem again. But then again, you probably don’t want to be running Fedora in a production environment, RedHat Enterprise or CentOS 5 are a much more viable alternative

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

September 27, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

University of Toronto Announces Snowflock

September 13, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Andres Lagar-Cavilla wrote in to announce the news that he and his team have just released Snowflock.

Snowflock lets you clone Xen VMs into dozens of identical replicas running in different hosts. Snowflock can do this in less than a second and with very low runtime overhead. With Snowflock you can, for example, perform parallel computations on the fly by scaling “instantaneously” your computing footprint in a shared cluster. Snowflock is a research prototype, hence the 0.1 major-minor. A minimum degree of experience with Xen and Linux is necessary to use the system.

Snowflock is the joined work of researchers at both the the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto and at Carnegie Mellon University. Snowflock has been released in a binary and source release, under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The release is available at http://compbio.cs.toronto.edu/snowflock

Snowflock was presented earlier this year at the Xen Summit North America 2008. A more complete description of the implementation and functionality of Snowflock is available in this technical report.

Citrix To Jump On Cloud Wagon, But How?

September 10, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

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Tarry is hinting at a “big” announcement that Citrix will make on september 15th. He reveals nothing, apparently having signed an NDA, but hints that the news concerns his topic of focus of lately.

Tarry’s blog recently shifted from pure virtualization news to reports on virtualization and cloud computing. So our bet is that Citrix will be jumping on the “Cloud Wagon”, or should we say “Cloud Hype” somewhere next week. And why shouldn’t they?

(Update: one of our commenters suspects an acquisition of some sorts, and that’s not unlikely.)

Citrix has been in the business of remotely accessing applications and managing such environments since they started out, so it makes perfect sense for them to actually tebrand their whole product line from Citrix to Xen … and then to “XenCloud”.

Oh, and Intel obviously will announce a new chip, called the CloudCore, no more need to buy an octocore CPU, Intel will instead host them for you. 🙂

On the other hand: given next week’s VMWorld event, Citrix and Intel might also be announcing some real news to steal some of VMware’s thunder.

What’s your guess?

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

September 4, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 5 Comments

According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.