Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Sun xVM

LiveTime Software Ships New Service Desk Virtual Appliance for Sun xVM and VMware

by Leave a Comment

LiveTime Software, a provider of ITIL certified Service Management and Help Desk Software, today released version 2.0 of its integrated virtual appliance consisting of its Java technology based JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) and ITIL Service Management software. The new release features support for both Sun xVM and VMware, and aims to leverage the power of both virtualization architectures at both the desktop and server levels.

The combination of LiveTime’s ITIL based Service Management and Sun xVM gives customers and SaaS providers a way to leverage their existing resources. LiveTime says it has improved the performance of its JeOS by approximately 20% and has decreased the memory overhead to 128Mb, enabling higher concurrency and increasing the number of virtual machines per server. This is particularly important for SaaS providers who deploy separate LiveTime instances per client and for multi-tenant requirements. The appliance also includes support for symmetric multiprocessing for optimal performance across virtualized CPU’s.

LiveTime’s virtual appliance includes built-in debugging, configuration and management utilities. Guided menus provide easy access to networking, upgrades and general system utilities. The LiveTime Virtual appliance currently supports all Sun xVM and VMware virtualization platforms, including Sun xVM VirtualBox, VMware Player, Workstation, Fusion, Server and ESX Server.

The LiveTime Virtual appliance supports Sun xVM VirtualBox, enabling developers to easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance should provide the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 160MB download.

VMware and Parallels Are Not Hyperventilating on Hyper-V Launch by Microsoft (video interviews)

by Leave a Comment

Last week we happened to be at VMware’s headquarters when Microsoft launched Hyper-V, Redmond’s much anticipated built-in hypervisor for Windows Server 2008. So we got our camera rolling to capture VMware’s reaction on Microsoft’s free hypervisor offering. Straight after that exclusive interview, we flew from Silicon Valley to New York to collect more video feedback from Parallels. Both vendors calmly welcomed Microsoft to the bare-metal hypervisor market and underlined Hyper-V is only a first version product release from Microsoft, missing critical features, which virtualization spoiled clients can no longer miss in their datacenters.

The video is also up on YouTube, Steamocracy and Blip.tv.

As an introduction to novice readers, we shortly explain the difference between Hyper-V (a bare-metal hypervisor), and the older Virtualization products Microsoft has been marketing, such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server (sometimes confusingly referred to as hosted hypervisors). Hyper-V is a bare-metal hypervisor (commonly referred to as Type 1 or Native Virtualization), which is software that runs directly on the hardware, as an operating system control program. A guest operating system such as Windows, Solaris or Linux thus runs at the second level above the hardware. This means Hyper-V is only a thin abstraction layer which boots on the native hardware and thus provides hardware abstraction services to the operatingsystem environment (performing some of the functions of an OS kernel). This differs from hosted hypervisors (commonly referred to as Type 2 or Host-Based Virtualization), which is software that runs within an operating system environment (Host). A guest operating system (Virtual Machine) thus runs at the third level above the host and the underlying hardware. Bare-metal hypervisors are supposedly faster and more enterprise scalable. The disadvantages are most of these hypervisors are hardware dependent and usually require hardware support to get the most out of the virtualized feature set (i.e. Intel VT or AMD-V processors).

At VMware we got a first reaction on Hyper-V from John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing: “Hyper-V is a first generation product. It is a hypervisor that runs virtual machines and that is what Vmware has been doing since back in 2000-2001. What it doesn’t offer is a whole set of virtual infrastructure capabilities, that would run on top of a hypervisor. Things like: Live migration with VMotion or resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines. These are really fundamental capabilities that our customers tell us are required for doing production consolidation or for providing high-availability for virtual machines or for running a disaster recovery solution on top of Virtualization. So from our perspective Hyper-V is a first generation product. Our customers are asking for a whole rich virtualization set of virtual infrastructure software that goes well beyond just a hypervisor.”

Kurt Daniel, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Online at Parallels went on to add “…we actually are a big partner of Microsoft and them of us in the hosting and Software-as-a-Service-markets for Virtualization and Automation. In the general market we see Hyper-V as being late to the market and having a platform deficit… It is also a little bit of ‘now you see it and now you don’t get it’-Virtualization in terms of missing live migration that was initially promised. That is a ticket-to-entry-feature that Parallels offers …Finally we think IT pro’s and developers are not fooled by the low price [free with the Windows Server 2008 OS ]…and we think it does fall short in this early release”

Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Iron summarizes it this way “Even more importantly, Hyper-V doesn’t have the mobility, high availability, recoverability and load balancing capabilities that actually make server virtualization valuable to customers. Yes, it will provide server consolidation, but that is the easier part of server virtualization and for most customers, not where the real value is.”

Sun’s Senior Director of xVM, Vijay Sarathy markets his concerns as follows “We’re glad to see Microsoft finally entering the hypervisor market. Customers are hungry for virtualization solutions that support a wide range of operating systems and virtualization platforms. Simply put, Sun is committed to building a heterogeneous (Windows, Linux and Solaris) and interoperable (ESX and Hyper-V) virtualization platform. To that end, Sun has joined Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, supporting Windows as a guest operating system on Sun’s xVM Server hypervisor…With Sun xVM VirtualBox, xVM VDI, xVM Server and xVM Ops Center Sun provides a holistic approach to Windows-focused customers looking for virtualization and management solutions. We’ve already seen great traction with Sun xVM VirtualBox, the industry’s first free and open source hypervisor to offer support for all major operating systems, including Windows, which has already been downloaded more than 5 million times.”

Microsoft’s missing Virtrualization feature list

Reading through the reactions from the competitiors make the missing feature list look something like this:

  1. No Live Virtual Machine relocation/migration capabilities: The ability to seamlessly live-move guest virtual machines from one physical server to another is offered by most Virtualization vendors, with products such as VMware VMotion , Parallels Virtuozzo, Citrix XenMotion, … These zero downtime migration capabilities are the most pointed at by the competition, but this cutting-edge feature seems less high on the priority list of SMB virtualization prospects with consolidation on their minds.
  2. Platform deficit (limited to Windows and Suse Linux Enterprise). In the glory days of the Bill Gates-era ‘Microsoft Windows’ was almost a synonym for ‘X86 desktop and server operating system’. So supporting a non-windows OS like Suse Linux is a fairly new ball game in Redmond and we are curious how this trend will develop into wider support of guest operating systems and distributions in Linux, BSD and Solaris…
  3. No hypervisor virtual machine transformation tools from competitor’s VM-formats into Microsoft’s VHD-format. Those who manage heterogeneous environments are impatiently waiting for the virtualization industry to embrace the DMTF Open Virtual Format (OVF) to ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. This should allow Microsoft System Center VMM to manage XenServer by using DMTF CIM based interfaces. All this openness with a hypervisor-independent portable virtual machine format promises transformation of a complete application workload with resource requirements, configuration and customization parameters, license and signatures to facilitate appliance integrity and security checking…
  4. Unproven and uncertain security levels are an easy and all-time favorite for competitors to throw at Microsoft. However their use of a full version of Microsoft Windows for the parent partition (fully trusted by Hyper-V) seems ‘courageous ’ as it extends the hypervisor attack surface.
  5. Limited virtual structure management capabilities. Although this and the next points cannot be expected from a pure hypervisor, many competitors point at an incomplete offering. It should be noted that the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) is currently downloadable in open beta testing and integration can be expected with Operation Manager (SCOM), Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM).
  6. No resource scheduling for load balancing Virtual Machines (VM)
  7. No virtual desktop management

Although Jason Perlow over at ZDnet is quite enthusiastic about Hyper-V, he does point to an additional Hyper-V Manager shortcoming when it comes to the administration and guest installation. “Unfortunately, Hyper-V Manager can only run natively in Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit) or on Vista SP1, so you will either need to administrate it from a few token Vista machines using the RSAT tools, via RDP connection, or directly from the Windows Server 2008 server console itself. RDP from a Terminal Server client itself is fine, as screen performance and response time is very good and runs even on Open Source Oses. However, RDP is infuriating to work from while a guest OS is being installed for the first time. For some odd reason, Hyper-V actually prevents you from using a mouse in a guest console window until the Integration Tools are actually installed, so you’ll have to be skilled in using the key when installing a guest from remote if you keep XP or Linux at your desk. Hopefully, your datacenter uses IP KVM infrastructure if you don’t want to stand up a Vista system or another copy of Server 2008 on your desk to administrate your remote boxes for those times you do a guest install from scratch.” Jason goes on to applaud Microsoft for “…releasing the Hypercall Adapter into GPL, so both community and commercial Linux distributions will be able to take advantage of Hyper-V” .

We are confident that Mike Neil and his team at Microsoft are working hard to get those ‘missing’ features in future Virtualization product releases and it is believed Microsoft and Citrix/XenServer are collaborating on merging the code additions from the Hypercall Adapter into the upstream Linux Xen Kernel, so that in the future, a separate Hypercall Adapter will not be necessary for Linux.

Independent analyst and blogger Brian Madden boldly predicts that Citrix XenServer might drop Xen as the underlying virtualization engine and switch to Hyper-V in order to put the ‘relationship’ between Microsoft and Citrix back in balance. He reminds us that the Hyper-V and Xen architecture are much alike. We hesitate if IT-relationships make you lose your ‘soul’ so easily, but will treat Brian to a round of free drinks if his unlikely prediction becomes true in the near future. We do know the Xen-community would be relieved to be able to add the Xen brand name to its products again.

It is interesting to read no competitors are hinting directly at potential stability issues, they do all repeat the CIO-mantra of not adopting a Redmond first version for mission critical systems. Even though Microsoft itself relies on Hyper-V for its own datacenters to handle a part of its live traffic.

There seems no more money to be made in ‘basic’ hypervisors (mobile devices might be the short term exception to this rule). So vendors have to excel in a niche or extend to a complete virtualization portfolio where their product offering supports a large number operating systems, with minimal hypervisor overhead to boost guest performance, open API’s and holistic management tools around the hypervisor to easily manage both the virtual and physical infrastructure components as servers, desktops, network, storage while taking care of securityy, high-availibility and disaster recovery. They might even have to throw in a connection broker (VDI). Those broad virtualization vendors that manage to ‘host’ a profitable third-part eco-system around their own products seem to have the best long term perspective for large market adoption.

Our guess is that Microsoft preferred to release an ‘incomplete’ hypervisor 1.0 ahead of schedule to aim for the SMB-market in the short term and get partners on their train. Microsoft sacrified the announced ‘Live migration’-capabilities from the Hyper-V feature set to shorten the time to market. But in a few quarters we expect Microsoft to approach their corporate clients with a Hyper-V 2.0 release that could put them on par with the competition’s richer feature sets. By that time Microsoft might also be able to boast about its fully integrated offering within their management tool family and a wider support of non-Microsoft operating systems and a list add-on products by external partners.

Time will tell. In the mean time we will continue to cover on the hypervisor battles from the trenches of our beloved Virtualization industry.

Talk back in comments below and let us know what experience Hyper-V gives you or which top 5 industry players you expect to rule in a year and for which niche markets; such as the hypervisor market, the host-based virtualization industry, virtual desktop infrastructure or even for the holistic virtual and physical infrastructure management suites.

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 4)

by Leave a Comment

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the fourth and last part (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his light on Citrix Xenserver, relocating virtual machines (VM), VM-mirroring, OVF, page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, Virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, self-healing servers, Xen embedded in firmware, why Amazon goes with Xen, the Xen GPL license, OracleVM, xVM (Sun), Parallels and the future of virtualization…

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). As said, this is the final part (soon, you’ll also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

The video is also up on YouTube and Steamocracy.

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 3)

by Leave a Comment

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the third part (see part 1 and part 2) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his XenServer light on the Xen page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, …

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time (see part 1 and part 2). As said, this is the third part (you can also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

This video is also available on Vimeo and Streamocracy.

(0:02) As you are one of the core members of the Xen project, you know that one of the hardest issues to address are the shadow page tables, which are a head ache when you build a hypervisor. I believe you are in the 6th rewrite of the Xen page tables algorithms. At the same time we see that the hardware vendors try to address this in a different way, by supporting it from the hardware up. What is the best way to go?

“It is one of those areas where having some hardware support certainly helps, but it is not a panacea, certainly with the hardware implementations that exist today. There are plenty of benchmarks (probably most benchmarks) that prove that the software approach of Xen wins out. Because there has been a lot of investment into that software approach and there is some really clever code in there right now, written by some super smart people. It is an interesting arms race between the two. One of the things that we are looking at is depending on the workload -dynamically chosen- whether you use the hardware approach or the purely software approach. You kind of hope that for that particular one –at least for the basic functionality- the hardware wins out over time. But there will always be parts of virtualizing the MMU (Memory Management Unit) which are best done by software. That is where OS-enlightment (aka) Para-virtualization comes in. That is a huge win for virtualizing the MMU.”

(1:30) That is a term I hear more often now. Where does the marketing term: “OS-enlightment” come from?

“We had been using the term para-virtualization. I think it was Microsoft that came up with the term “enlightment”, which we have been told is very much a nod to the Xen-heritage. Microsoft probably has rather more budget to spend on marketing than open source projects.”

We all know Microsoft understands a few things about marketing.

“I am not at all upset with that term. I am quite happy to use it and adopt it.”

(2:09) So Ian, it is quite interesting you just mentioned Citrix and the sun joined us. Do you think the contributions from the open source community have slowed down since the Citrix takeover?

“We certainly have not 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 setup XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, which we did not do. It is still the same group of guys, basically myself, Keir Fraser, Steve Hand, Christian Limpach…all off the same guys working on the project, with now many more off course.

Then Citrix acquired XenSource and we obviously had to explain to people what was happening. I think our community has seen that nothing has changed. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency. We have setup Xen.org, the Xen advisory board and all of the web site and everything where we run Xen.org. The advisory board now has focus from companies like Intel , AMD, HP, IBM. All big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have that oversight from the advisory board. So I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

(3:33) How do you see the shift XenSource (now XenServer) made from building a para-virtualized platform, that served the open-source community and mainly targeted unix/linux-environments, to a company which has another main audience with Bill, the average Windows admin.

“We were never focused just on running only open source operating systems. That was never the aim. We wanted to build a platform that would be OS-agnostic and to be able to run any OS and do a great job at it. We have always put an awful lot of effort into supporting Windows, because there are a lot of windows OS instances out there, we can’t deny that. It is something that always has been important to us. What is different is the way that XenSource and now Citrix look at packaging Xen. Lots of different companies are bringing Xen to market. Obviously the Linux vendors are mainly concerned about running Linux. Solaris and Sun are mainly concerned about running Solaris. One of the things Citrix / Xenserver are trying to do is making sure it is OS agnostic and we did a great job at running Windows and a great job at running Linux as well.
Xen is awesome running Linux and completely blows any other virtualization solution out of the water and at running Windows it is extremely good too. Let’s put it this way: I am unaware of any benchmarks we lose. “

(05:02) When you look at the fight going on between the companies building the management frameworks for Xen and projects like Enomaly, OpenQrm, Redhat & Novell. Was the acquisition of Xensource by Citrix your easy way out of that fight?

“I think we are still very much in the fight. Xensource and all of these other companies are building management frameworks on top of Xen. I think that all of these companies are coming at it from a different point of view. Linux vendors are trying to provide that same look & feel they have within Linux and expose Virtualization through those same GUIs and tools. The difference is that companies like XenSource and Citrix are interested in making it very easy to use and are building a Virtual Machine hosting appliance, hiding all that complexity and expose it via a web GUI or a Windows user interface.

There are always going to be lots of companies building tools on top of Xen. Even if you look at XenServer, there are all of these other companies building products on top of XenServer, like Egenera, Platform, Marathon. There is a very healthy eco-system of building stuff on top of other people’s stuf. I guess people are happy, because everybody is making money.”

06:27 Some analysts say Microsoft acquired Xensource by proxy, hinting at a future take-over of Citrix by Microsoft. What is your opinion on that topic?

“I truly do not know anything about that. I think if Microsoft was going to buy Citrix, it would have done so a long time ago. I think that Microsoft is a very close Citrix partner and that XenSource has worked with Microsoft as well. There are a number of projects on which we have worked together, such as defining some of the para-virtualization or OS-enlightment extensions to enable Xen-guests to run on Microsoft’s hypervisor when that ships and also vice-versa. We have always found Microsoft quite easy to deal with to be honest.”

(07:16) You get good support from Microsoft?

“Certainly all the people that we deal with are perfectly nice guys.”

(7:23) So let’s talk about the less perfectly nice guys & women. When I read articles on blogs and in the press, I feel that VMware is recently throwing some mud at Citrix and Xensource and especially the marketing department. They try to cast some doubt on your products and projects. What do you think about these marketing techniques?

“Well there has been a certain use of FUD-tactics and things like that. That is sort of a natural reaction. That is what marketing departments will go and do. We have good working relationships with some of the technical folks at VMware and we work together on the OVF virtual appliance format. I know that some of their engineers get pretty embarrassed about some of the stuff their marketing department does. VMware tries to position things which are Xen features or architectural implementations as ‘weaknesses’ against their product. Whereas they know they have teams working flat out to get and implement those same ‘weaknesses’ into their own product. That is just the way it is. Marketing departments go off and do that, but at the end of the day customers will hopefully get the right message and buy the right product.”

(08:45) At least it shows they take you seriously.

“I guess we should be flattered.”

View part 1 or part 2 of this interview.

Sun xVM VirtualBox Downloads Pass The Five Million Mark

by Leave a Comment

Sun Microsystems today announced that Sun xVM VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software it acquired by taking over its maker innotek earlier this year, has surpassed five million downloads in just 18 months.

Sun xVM VirtualBox

The press release touts the xVM VirtualBox 1.6 software to be the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems (OS), including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sun unveiled xVM VirtualBox 1.6 earlier this month. Currently downloaded more than 10,000 times a day, the new version includes more than 2,000 enhancements and full support for Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris host operating systems. It also features newly added support for high performance virtual devices, improved scalability and Web services for remote administration.

xVM VirtualBox software is a key component of Sun’s xVM virtualization and management software portfolio, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center, Sun xVM Server, expected for release in the Summer of 2008, and the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software.

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 2)

by 3 Comments

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the second part (watch the first part here) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his light on the Xen GPL license, OracleVM, xVM (Sun), the future of virtualization and XenServer.

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time. As said, this is the second part (you can also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

This video is also available on Vimeo and Streamocracy.

(0:02) Could Virtualization also help the infrastructure to become more self-healing or self-provisioning?

“Sure. It is already the case that you can have a pool of physical hardware. Something that Xen calls a resource pool and than a pool of VMs running on top. You can configure things as the referrer to give “down notices”, so you can fail over those virtual machines. There are plenty of people who do that today on Xen.”

(0:31) When I look at the Xen GPL-license. I find it interesting that Xen is being renamed as xVM by Sun, OracleVM by Oracle. When Oracle first announced OracleVM it quickly had to admit it was actually a tweaked Xen version. I heard they initially did not publish the tweaked code.

“Oh no, they have. The fact is that there are lots of different vendors, shipping Xen products as they pick up the Xen hypervisor core engine and incorporate it into their own products. The Linux vendors: like Novell and Redhat, there is Sun, there is obviously XenSource / Citrix and Virtual Iron. 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 company just pick it up as is. They 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 a lot of uniformity in the Xen versions out there.”

(1:40) As many of these projects like Sun’s xVM and Oracle’s VM are using the Xen project. At what level are they tweaking their own software to be more integrated with Xen or to be more stable or faster?

“Most of those companies are very close to mainline Xen. They post a couple of patches. In some cases they maybe not. What they will 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 things. They might have their own management tool. They will 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 as they use for exposing other facilities inside that operating system. Which is quite different from what a company like XenSource was trying to do, which tried and effectively build a virtual machine hosting appliance. You just put the CD in the server, install it and just manage it from a windows GUI or web interface. Every company is bringing Xen to market in a different way for a different kind of user. And that is where the differentiation happens. The core engine is the same throughout.”

(03:31) You think that is what the future will bring us? You buy a piece of hardware and just initiate it, to install an operating system.

“I think it will go way further than that. We have always envisioned getting Xen embedded in the firmware as we think that the hypervisor is a core part of the platform. We think it should come with servers when they role of the production line and they should all have Xen installed on them. And the really cool thing is that this is happening. Dell is already announcing that in their new servers shipping later this year, Xen will be a factory installed option in flash memory. Other hardware vendors are to follow soon. People will have ubiquitous virtualization, every server will have Xen installed on it. You will be able to install multiple operating systems and virtual appliances, etc. on top of the hardware.”

(04:33) So now the x86-type of servers are becoming very similar to what mainframes are used to for decades?

“Exactly, it will be a similar model. The difference will be that you can start using these x86-servers, connecting them into resource pools and than running pools of VMs on top of these pools of servers. That is when things start becoming really interesting.”

(04:58 ) You think people will need to rethink their whole infrastructure even more drastically than they do today?

“Yes, today virtualization is typically used for sort of server consolidation. Often used for taking legacy applications or old versions of operating systems and consolidating them onto a single machine…
I think that the way that things are going to be tomorrow and start happening today (and for which Xen is brilliantly prepared) is actually for running production workloads, where all of your machines and partners are running hypervisors and that enables you to run any virtual machine image on any physical machine to take advantage of being able to move workloads around by using live relocation. Also balancing of VMs to servers and even features like fault tolerance and the stuff we talked about, which you want for production workloads.”

(05:59) If you ask people to name a virtualization vendor, VMware will probably come up first. They definitely have a track record to have built this market. But if you look at really big IT-datacenter applications like Amazon, Google or MySpace, they actually deployed Xen as their core engine. It appears all of the Fortune top 100 companies in the United States are VMware clients. So why do banks go for VMware and these major datacenters for Xen?

“I think you will see plenty of banks switching to Xen and plenty of them already have, as it is obviously a lot cheaper to deploy Xen. The reason that companies such as Amazon go with Xen, is that when you do these large virtualization deployments, you want to be using something to secure great performance and some of the high-end second-generation virtualization features. Xen certainly has all that and also has the advantage that it is open source. So there is not going to be vendor lock-in, with a number of different Xen-vendors to procure from and the price is right. For a sophisticated company like Amazon, they will just download the open source version and they will have 20 engineers deploying it across machines. There are plenty of other companies that will rather tank one of the pre-packaged versions from one of the Xen-vendors. I think that many of the large virtualization deployments -such as Amazon- are on Xen because it works better.”

Go back to part 1 of this interview