Kris Buytaert

Ulteo Releases Ulteo Virtual Desktop Beta, Wants To Get Linux Applications on Windows Desktops

May 20, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Ulteo has just announced the beta version of their “Ulteo Virtual Desktop”.

The Ulteo Virtual Desktop allows you to use a large variety of Linux applications on the Windows operating system, and all features that are already available with the Ulteo Application System.

Ulteo Virtual Desktop uses special technology built on the top of coLinux. It offers performance close to a native installation on the hardware because it doesn’t use traditional virtualization software.

Ulteo was founded by Gaël Duval, former creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), the premier Linux distribution in France with a strong focus on desktop.

$500 Million For XenSource, Where Did All The Money Go?

May 17, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

Over at Cambridge Cluster , Philip Baddeley wonders where the $500 million that Citrix paid for Xensource has gone.

In August of last year, Citrix and XenSource agreed on an acquisition price of $500 million in a mixture of cash and Citrix stock. The deal came trough in late October of 2007. Now 7 months later, Philip wonders where all the money went.

“You don’t hear as much about Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sevin Rosen as you used to. Kleiner Perkins is busy investing in anything but consumer Internet companies while Sevin Rosen decided against raising another fund last year. But, they are still cashing checks. The pair invested $6 million in a first round investment in January 2005 into. That’s a big hit for the duo. Other beneficiaries include Accel Partners, Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates.”

Philip mainly wonders how much of that money stayed in Cambridge:

“Was Cambridge Enterprise involved? It would have ranked as one of their top investments. If not, why not? Why was such a good deal funded outside of the Cambridge Cluster? Did any of the Cambridge Angels or the other groups invest? There is no trace of XenSource on the Cambridge Evening News website. It would make a great Equity Fingerprint and case study but I guess it was registered in Delaware and so all the details are not available. Hopefully the Cambridge Cluster has a couple or ten of new angels to keep turning the wheels. Just think what the Cambridge Cluster could have done with $500 million …”

Obviously the University of Cambridge played a big role in the conception of Xen. But did it get a return on its investment?

Interesting question.

Xen Summit Boston, Partial Schedule Announced

May 12, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Stephen Spector has just announced the current agenda for the upcoming Boston Xen Summit.

Ian Pratt and Keir Fraser will kick off the event with an overview of the Xen roadmap.

After that there will be talks about XenLoop, A Transparent Inter-VM Network Loopback Channel and trusted VMs. Tamura Yoshiaki from NTT will be talking about Virtual Machine Synchronization for Fault Tolerance using DomT and other topics are still under review by the Program Committee.

More news when the final schedule is announced .

KVM vs Xen, Who Will Win The Fight?

May 9, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Ian Pratt and Benny Schnaider are using strong words against each other.

As KVM is gaining more and more popularity by being adopted in several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, the battle between different virtualization technologies continues to be interesting.

While KVM is being adopted by a variety of software and distribution vendors, Xen is being adopted by hardware vendors to be shipped directly with the iron.

We asked Ian at FOSDEM if he felth the Xen community was changing and if he thought the contributions from the community were slowing down.

“We certainly haven’t seen that. If you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes. When we left the University to set up XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, but we didn’t. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency by setting up the Xen advisory board and the Xen.org website. The advisory board has members from companies like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, … big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have oversight from the advisory board, so I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

According to ZDNet, Ian also claims that “KVM is not a true hypervisor. It tries to add virtualization capabilities to the Linux kernel but it’s not a true hypervisor approach. The Xen community is alive and well. Xen is a true hypervisor architecture that’s better for scalability, security and availability.

One of the biggest arguments against Xen is that KVM is already in the kernel. Theodore Ts’o thinks “it’s inevitable that Red Hat and Novell will standardize on KVM because of its inclusion in the kernel.” Xen never finished their efforts and KVM was quickly adopted into that same Linux Kernel.

Strong words also from the KVM front:

“If Xen will die or not die, I don’t know. But KVM will take over and be the virtualization selection of choice,” said Benny Schnaider, CEO and co-founder of Qumranet.

KVM or Xen? Time will tell, today both have different features and it will take some time until their feature set is similar, so the choice is about what YOU need, not about what the vendors claim you need.

[Source: ZDNet]

Xen API Project Announced

April 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Stephen Spector, Xen.org community manager has just announced that he’s calling for the community willing to work on completing the existing Xen-API specification.

“So, I am announcing a new community effort to complete the development of the Xen-API utilities. If you are interested in working on the Xen-API project please email me at [email protected] and I will call a meeting in mid-May with all people interested to get the project underway.”

More information about the Xen API can be found on the XenSource Wiki

KVM Forum 2008 Schedule Has Been Announced

April 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The schedule for the upcoming KVM 2008 forum in Nappa, CA is up.

Qumranet, as the main KVM sponsor, is inviting all KVM developers to their second KVM summit on June 10 to 13th at the Marriot Napa Valley, California.

Many of the world’s top kernel developers will gather to discuss the state of the union on KVM and virtualization technology in general. More specifically, the group will plan the technology roadmap and future of KVM.

Avi Kivity will be keynoting, and off course Qumranet will also talk about KVM in Solid ICE. Apart from that, there will be a variety of presentations from Red Hat, IBM, Transitive and Intel representatives.

Gerd Hoffmann of Red Hat (SUSE in a previous role) will be talking about mixing Xen and KVM with xenner, which is a utility able to run Xen paravirtualized kernels as guests on Linux hosts, without the Xen hypervisor and using kvm instead.

Different IBM people will be discussing the state of KVM on Big Iron and PowerPC. And there will also be some talk about Open-ovf , an open source software project around the Open Virtual Appliance Format.

Stay tuned for more!

(Full disclosure: Virtualization.com is a media partner of the KVM Forum 2008)