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The Present And Future of Xen

April 7, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Over the past few months, a number of people have been vouching the idea that Xen’s development and adoption is slowing down because of the Citrix’ acquisition.

Paula over at ZDNet appears to have misunderstood what XenSource/Citrix explained her.

Citrix might have jumped some marketing hoops by first claiming to be an application delivery company, then trying to position itself next to VMWare as a virtualization company, and subsequently buying XenSource in order to reclaim its application delivery role while trying to benefit from the Xen brand.

But rest assured: they are still heavily backing Xen.

Paula proclaims:

“Open source backers will likely take another look at Xen and re-consider other open source firms embracing virtualization”

Well … it’s true different open source integrators were confused when XenSource decided to take their XenEnterprise 4.0 management GUI Windows-only, leaving the Linux Desktop users in the cold. Yes, some customers were lost, but the open source guys were never interested in a GUI that limited the functionality of an open and free product they were used to work with anyway, and neither were the kernel code contributors. So the question is if they were looking at XenSource in the first place.

At FOSDEM, we asked Ian Pratt how he feels about the evolution of the Xen open source community after the Citrix acquisition and if he thought the contributions from the community were slowing down. An excerpt from our interview:

“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 of and take Xen in closed source or something, but we didn’t. It’s the same group of guys, basically myself, Keir Frasier, Steve Hand working on the project, and now many more of course. The Citrix acquisition of XenSource was obviously something we had to explain to people. I think the community has seen that nothing has changed . One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency, set up Xen.org , 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.”

In a video interview with Tarry Singh at VMworld Europe 2008, Simon Crosby stated:

“You have to understand that Xen is the foundation of the faith, we (Citrix) are first and foremost committed to this community and to that method of development for the server tools and Hypervisor. So one of the community questions was that Citrix was not known for open source and what was gonna happen with Xen.

It turned out, otherwise we would never have agreed to go, that Citrix has thrown a huge amount of money towards the open source community. We’ve setup Xen.org – we’ve always wanted to do that, as a start-up we could never get there.

Xen.org is run by a charter committee of the major contributors and it has its own program management and it’s independent of us (Citrix) and that’s exactly the way we wanted it. Ian still leads the project, we still probably contribute about 60% of the code, but also all of these major partners deliver to us.

So the community is going from strength to strength, which is terrific.

We had 2 or 3 developer summits each year, at the one we had at the end of last year in Santa Clara we had more than 200 people attend.”

When comparing Xen.org to Eclipse.org, Simon replied:

“The difference is that Eclipse is an independent legal entity. With the Xen community, we discussed whether or not to do that and the cost of it and we decided that we would not do that, so we set up a steering committee which oversees several key components of Xen. First of all, the road map that advises the project on where to go, it sets the policy by which the Xen trademark is used and then that is all administered for the benefit of the community with the explicit admission by the advisory board by Citrix

It leaves us without the cost and the legal infrastructures of setting independent .org but with all principle and all the guiding.”

The Last Xen Summit was a 200-person conference, mainly Xen developers, with people from Sun, HP, Novell, RedHat, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Intel, AMD, Samsung, Solarflare, Google and of course Xensource/Citrix It’s too bad Ohloh doesn’t support Mercurial (the Xen.org source managemt system) or we could have had real statistics on the Xen contributions but it’s fairly obvious most of the big players are contributing.

Which linux distro didn’t adopt Xen as a virtualization technology ? Xen Adoption in which distro ? True they are supporting other open source technologies apart from Xen and they are working on creating a uniform way to manage different virtualization techniques, but no matter how you look at it.. they all adopted Xen.

So let’s have a look at the companies that are adopting Xen in their products, starting with Citrix.

When XenEnterprise initially launched, Peter Levine told the world that their target audience was to provide easy-to-install (in less than 10 minutes as he could do himself) bare-metal virtualization for the Windows market. They were not planning a RedHat / MySQL style Xen distribution in free and commercial versions with support and updates, they went straight for a target audience that was used to buy proprietary software from a vendor, the Windows users.

Apart from Citrix, which is planning to launch their XenEnterprise 4.1 release in the next couple of months, amongst the first adopters were RedHat and Novell.

When Novell claimed first adoption , RedHat was saying Xen wasn’t stable enough yet. But today, Xen is a core part of both major Linux Distributors offerings. (and with them lots of other Linux distributions) The race however continues when RedHat and Novell started fighting over which version was about to offer better Window guest support 🙂

Amazon was also a really fast adopter. When Jeff Barr announced the Elastic Compute Cloud Beta, he told the world that they had built EC2 using Xen. In essance, Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, allows users to deploy server instances on-demand. Amazon isn’t selling Xen as a product, they are using Xen to provide the world with one of their most used services. Different startups and SMBs are using EC2 as their home on the web.

And let’s have a look at the people selling Xen implementations.

Virtual Iron came from a dubious non-Xen background and is now positioning its platform as an Enterprise-level platform for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management. Their product consists of a Java-based Virtualization Manager that is used to manage the virtualization services that are deployed on bare-metal servers.

Back in 2007, Simon Crosby wrote:

“The Virtual Iron Hypervisor is not the Xen Hypervisor – it’s a proprietary product (some of which is open-sourced because they use bits & pieces of Xen code). Virtual Iron has not yet made any significant contributions back to the Xen community. Presumably they believe this gives them an edge in the market. Maybe it does. But if that’s the case, I don’t understand why they don’t just stand up and say so, rather than trying to jump on the Xen brand-wagon.”

Simon invited them multiple times to join the Xen community and it seems they accepted the invitation as the Virtual Iron people were even presenting on the last Xen summit. According to Wikipedia, today – as so many others – their platform is based on the Xen Hypervisor. The exact answer is probably somewhere in the source code.

When in November 2007, Oracle first launched their OracleVM there was a lot of fuzz because Oracle claimed both features other people didn’t have as well as better performance. Back then I blogged:

“First, seemingly Larry is claiming that his Xen package is better than others since he supports Live Migration and all the others don’t. I don’t know where he gets that idea.. I have to admit I don’t remember which year it was, but it was somewhere in December when I first started with Live Migration of Xen machines and it was also on a CentOS platform. No fancy GUI, no hardcover manuals that had it all documented. But fast and seamlessly working live migration, ready for everybody to use. Second, he is claiming that Xen was re-engineered by Oracle to be faster than the competition. The way you read it there is that Oracle took Xen, modified it then started redistributing it. Is that really what happened ? Are they redistributing the source, or are they violating the GPL ? Because if they are redistributing the source, everybody just got a faster Xen.”

Earlier, Charles Philips from Oracle had been telling GCN that cite “We’re big proponents of Linux and standard technologies, so we’re going to put the time toward Xen,” Phillips said. “Our strategy will be around Xen.” which didn’t surprise anybody as Oracle had been pushing before to get a single virtualization supportive interface into the Linux kernel.

The openSolaris people started out with building a DomU for Xen, at first, but what they really wanted was to run openSolaris for both their Dom0 and DomU. Today Sun is supporting the sun seemed to be working on Xen for Sparc but it seems they abandoned that effort.

Obviously Sun has is Solaris Zones technology but as running different isolated environments on one kernel is totally different from running different kernels Zones and xVM are obviously complementary technologies.

Toon Vanagt asked Ian Pratt :

“When I look at the Xen GPL License, I found it interesting that Xen is being renamed as xVM by Sun, OracleVM by Oracle. Oracle first announced OracleVM and then had to admit it was actually a tweaked Xen version. But they didn’t publish the tweaked code, did they?”

Ian’s reply:

“Oh no, they have. I mean, the fact is that there are lots of different vendors shipping Xen products that also they ship the Xen engine, pick up the Hypervisor the core engine and incorporate it into their own products. Obviously, the Linux vendors Novell and Redhat, there is Sun, there is obviously Xensource / Citrix , Virtual Iron, etc. Lots of different companies are doing that. Actually the GPL license means that any changes they make will go back into the main project. In reality, pretty much all those companies just pick it up as is. Take the latest stable release, which is maintained, they might add the odd little patch to it, but it really is all very clear, there is all uniformity in the Xen versions that are out there.”

“Most of those companies are very close to mainline Xen. They post a couple of patches in some cases, but not always. What they’ll be doing is taking Xen and it’s really on top of Xen , in the rest of their Virtualization stack that runs in user space, that’s where they’ll be probably doing their own of things, they’ll have their own management tools, they’ll have their own way of wanting to present virtualization to the user, so if you think about what the operating system vendors are typically doing is they want to expose virtualization using the same tools and user interfaces etc. they use for exposing other facilities in that operating system. Which if you think about it, is quite different from what companies like say Xensource is trying to do , which is to try and effectively build a virtual machine hosting appliance. You know, you just put the CD in the server, install it and just manage it from let’s say a windows GUI or a webinterface . So every company is bringing Xen to market in a different way for a different kind of user . And that is where the differentiation happens, but the core engine is the same throughout.”

So which Xen should you choose? One of the main decision points when choosing a Xen vendor is probably whether you want to virtualize Linux, Windows, or a mix. The different vendors have different relationships with Microsoft and will therefore be able to provide different levels of support and integration with their products. But one thing is certain: you have a lot more choice when going for a Xen alternative, than the other way around.

Building and maintaining a community is and will remain a difficult thing. Sun is learning that and Citrix / Xen.org will also have to learn that. Six months from now, the story might be totally different. But today Xen.org is growing stronger every day with corporate contributions from all over the planet.

Follow-up On Our April Fool’s Joke On Sun Acquiring Parallels

April 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

By now, you may have heard about the prank post we published on April Fool’s Day about Sun acquiring Parallels for $ 205 million. While the story was obviously fake, many people started speculating about its authenticity and – which was far more interesting – about the possibility of Parallels ever selling, and if so, at what price?

We were amused about the comments about it being ‘not so funny’, which was never the intention anyway. It wasn’t a joke, people, it was an April Fool. If it mislead you for even a second, that means it worked. It wasn’t supposed to make you laugh out loud, it was meant to get you thinking. We loved the response!

Honestly, did it?

Evidently, we didn’t want the prank to be a lame one, so we decided to run a story that would make people stop and think rather than being obviously fake, which is exactly what happened. As far as we’re concerned, it worked. We even got some feedback from both Sun and Parallels employees about the story, about how much they got a good laugh out of it. We loved reading the retaliatory post on the Parallels Consumer Tech blog, too.

Not exactly something to start a lawsuit over, or something that would actually affect the stock market, like some blogger ignorantly suggested (we hope he was joking too, because otherwise it would almost seem envious).

Anyway, official statements from parties mentionned in the article contained exactly the type of comment that official statements would have to feature: “Parallels is not for sale“, “Parallels is worth much more“, etc. (don’t you just love how these two kinda contradict each other?).

To be fair, we think Parallels is worth much more than $ 205 million as well, we weren’t trying to make a statement by picking that price, we just kinda went for it after thinking about it for a second or two. Same for the acquirer, we went for Sun after reading somewhere that Parallels would have been a great acquisition for Sun about 2 years ago, before it got so big.

Some of the points raised in the blog post by Ilya Baimetov, Directory of Technology at Parallels, are more interesting than the discussion about a good acquisition price, though. He says:

“SUN is a really strange acquirer. Our products are for Windows, Mac and Linux, and SUN is not that focused on the first two. Also, SUN is really not that much into automation, so again, not a good fit. If Microsoft or VMware or even HP or IBM was mentioned – it would make some sense, but not SUN.”

Excellent way to say you’re not for sale, guys! 😉

Now can we move on?

Gartner: Virtualization Wave To Cause Huge Market Disruption And Consolidation Through 2012

April 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Gartner says virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

From the press release (emphasis ours):

“Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.”

According to Gartner, the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. Server virtualization is already having an impact on the server market; Gartner believes that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 % in 2006. As hypervisor prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualization will have a significantly larger impact, and Gartner analysts predict that more than 4 million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.

The use of PC virtualization is also set to increase rapidly. The number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. On the PC, the decoupling technology that breaks the close ties and dependencies between hardware and software occurs at two levels: between hardware and the operating system (machine virtualization) and between the operating system and applications (application virtualization).

Check out Gartner’s special report on virtualization, including a number of useful guides and a podcast with industry analyst Thomas Bittman.

Sun Microsystems To Acquire Parallels For $ 205 Million (Updated)

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters 23 Comments

Looks like that Parallels IPO won’t be happening after all. Sun Microsystems has today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Parallels (formerly SWsoft) and all of its assets for a whopping $ 205 million. The major acquisition had been rumoured to be imminent throughout the course of 2007, but never actually went through, which led mosts analysts to believe the Herndon, VA-based company was heading towards an IPO following in VMware’s footsteps rather than being picked up by one of the big boys.

Needless to say, the acquisition is a pretty bold one, which is bound to serve as wake-up call for the entire virtualization industry. Both companies had been on a buying spree the past few months: Sun picked up innotek / VirtualBox, while Parallels recently acknowledged its January acquisition of ModernGigabyte. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by June, around the time Sun also plans to ship xVM Server.

“With the acquisition of Parallels, Sun’s ready to become the only true leader in virtualization technology,” said Brian Sutphin, Executive Vice President Corporate Development & Alliances for Sun Microsystems. “With Parallels’ strong desktop position, we will be able to cater both Windows/Linux and Mac users with our state-of-the-art virtualization offering.”

Sergei Beloussov, Board Chairman and CEO of Parallels, added:”We’re extremely excited about the opportunities this merger will bring for our many customers and partners. We’re looking forward to effectively integrating our server product line with Sun’s sparc systems.”

Parallels, former SWsoft, has been making waves ever since it was founded in 1999. The virtualization technology company today counts more than 900 employees worldwide and has more than doubled revenues every year for the past eight years, while its products have been giving VMware a run for its money, especially in the small- and medium-business marketplace. The company was backed in 2005 by Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Insight Venture Partners.

While VMware has been more than struggling to consolidate its splashing entry on the public market, Parallels has effectively become the second largest virtualization seller, with both containers and hypervisor plays in its portfolio. Sun’s bold move is logical in this regard, be it quite late, as this acquisition would have made more sense if it had happened around this time last year.

We’re still scrambling to get some official comments on the news from market insiders, we’ll update this post as they come in!

Update: obviously, this was an April Fool (we’re in based in Europe, so it’s April 1 earlier than over in the US).

On any other day, what would you think about this announcement? Would it have surprised you that much? Do you think it would be a fair valuation and a good synergy? Let us know in comments!

(also: check some classic April Fools’ Day jokes here)

Update 2: kudos to Parallels for their sense of humour, thanks to Brian, Dan and Tarry for linking and to the person who dugg the story 😉

Update 3: check out our follow-up post

Research: Virtualization Is Big in Asia Pacific, To Hit $ 1.35 Billion By 2010

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific is estimated to reach $ 1.35 billion with CAGR of 42 % by 2010, according to IT market research firm Springboard Research.

Virtualization services is estimated to touch $ 1 billion by 2010 and will form the major portion of this market as organizations will spend two to three times more on services than on software. According to the research, 50 % of CIOs want to deploy virtualization solutions over the next 18-24 months to address issues like low system capacity utilization, poor performance and other challenges associated with managing growing IT infrastructure.

The report is based on a survey of CIOs from large and mid-sized enterprises in Australia, China, India and Singapore.

“Our research indicates that virtualization, at least at the server level, is becoming an imperative and that a growing number of companies will implement virtualization at the server level in 2008,” said Michael Barnes, vice president – Software Research at Springboard Research.

“The complex nature of engagements with vendors and SIs while implementing virtualization solutions is a prime reason for virtualization services taking a larger share of the market,” he added.

On the software side, VMWare is the Asia Pacific virtualization market leader with an estimated 70 % market share, while Microsoft, Parallels, Virtual Iron and XenSource are other players with significant presence.

IBM, HP, Dell and Sun dominate the virtualization services market. Australia and Korea lead the virtualization marketplace in APAC due to their well-built infrastructure, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and India are high growth potential markets.

[Source: CIOL]

VMware Server 2.0 beta 2 Underway? (Confirmed)

March 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware is (finally) set to release beta 2 of VMware Server 2.0, which is reportedly to be announced at 6pm PST today.

Could be true, since the discussion forum at VMware is filled with people who are seeing an expiration deadline for their usage of the 4-month old beta 1, due next Sunday. The first post on the forum dates back to 24 March, but other members are not convinced a new build is actually coming, nor are they happy with the short-term note and the lack of communication from VMware.

More when there’s anything official to announce.

Update from that same discussion forum:

“We were all set to post Beta 2 today but encountered a last minute cosmetic issue on Windows installer (we saw it mostly on desktop Windows OS), so we are spinning up a new build tonight and will have everything posted mid afternoon (Pacific time) Friday March 28th. Sorry for the delay but it was a deliberate decision to take the hit now. Hang in there.”

Final update:

Beta 2 is available.

More info here, registration for download over here.

New features and enhancements in the VMware Server 2.0 Beta 2 release:

Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.
Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.
Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.
Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.
New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.
Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.
Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

Existing VMware Server 2.0 Beta features

New operating system support: The broadest operating system support of any host-based virtualization platform currently available, including support for Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.10 in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
More scalable virtual machines:Support for up to 8 GB of RAM (up from 3.6 GB in Server 1.0) per virtual machine, 10 virtual network interface cards and up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors per virtual machine.
64-bit guest operating system support:Use 64-bit guest operating systems on 64-bit hardware to enable more scalable and higher performing computing solutions.
Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode to improve performance in specific Linux environments.
Support for VIX API 1.5: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.