Xen

Xen Summit North America 2009

January 14, 2009 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The Xen.org community and Oracle are proud to announce the first major Xen event for 2009, Xen Summit North America at Oracle, February 24 – 25, 2009 at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood City, CA.

Global leaders developing for and using the open source Xen hypervisor will meet for 2 days of highly interactive discussion on product roadmaps, new features, and all things Xen related. With the increased
emphasis on the Xen Client Initiative, expect significant discussions on the port for the Xen hypervisor to all types of client devices.

Registration is only $215 and more event details are available at Xen.org. Included in the fee is an evening out at the Computer History Museum and other Xen Summit firsts!

If you have any questions, please contact Stephen Spector ([email protected]) for more information.

Release: ToutVirtual VirtualIQ Pro 3

January 14, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ToutVirtual, which develops software for managing virtual computing products, announced that it has upgraded its VirtualIQ Pro product. The firm’s software is used by system administrators to manage virtual servers from VMware, Xen, Microsoft, and others.

ToutVirtual said the upgraded VirtualIQ Pro 3 product adds new auditing features to track physical asset and non-virtual asset changes; an integrated administration console; analysis of migration from physical to virtual servers; along with other features.

VirtualIQ Pro software supports unlimited number of CPU sockets and unlimited virtual machines. Several pricing levels for VirtualIQ Pro are available based on CPU socket and VM support. As a quick-start or test drive, VirtualIQ Pro for up to 5 CPU sockets or 25 virtual machines is available for free download. Pricing starts at $199 per CPU socket per year.

Open Source Virtualization Updates

January 7, 2009 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

There is a lot going on in the different Open Source Virtualization projects. From KVM, over OpenVZ , to Xen.

First of all there is the news that Anthony Liguori has included kvm support in the main Qemu development tree. In his blogpost Avi Kivity explains that with the KVM code being merged in Qemu development and integration of new and bigger features will evolve faster.

But now that kvm has been merged, it is possible to make larger modifications to qemu in order to make it fit virtualization roles better. Live migration and virtio have already been merged. Device and cpu hotplug are on the queue. Deeper changes, like modifying how qemu manages memory and performs DMA, are pending.

Then there is some discussion going on about the future of OpenVZ , mainly targeted at licencing and Pete Zaitcev is wondering why Parallels hasn’t officialy modified its COPYING.SWsoft file whic
h mainly tells the world “we’re not serious about going upstream” and which makes him wonder
“Kinda makes LXC more of a fait accompli than it already is or needs to be.” According to the LXH site , the planned Linux kernel version for which LXC should be fully functionaly is 2.6.29.

And last but not least Xen has released 2 minor maintenance releases for their 3.1 and 3.2 branches Xen 3.3.1 and Xen 3.2.3 are now available for download.

The Xen of Oracle, or was it the Oracle of Xen ?

December 19, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 1 Comment

The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.

“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”

Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.

Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.

Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”

Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.

Kemari v1.0 Released

December 6, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Last month,TAMURA Yoshiaki from the Kernel Group , OSS Computing Project at the NTT Cyber Space Labs announced the availability of Kemari on the Xen Devel mailing list.

Kemari is an open-source virtual machine synchronization mechanism for fault tolerance. It’s similar to Remus which we covered earlier.

Kemari tries to achieve a fault tolerance setup that does not
require the use of specific hardware or modification of applications.
Kemari aims to keep VMs transparently running in times of hardware
failures. It transfers the state of the primary VM to the secondary
VM when the primary VM is about to send an event to devices such as
storage and networks.
In short it is trying to real time mirroring of Virtual Machine instances.

The, source (Kemari has been released under the GPL) , documentation and different presentations including a Video running both a Linux and Windows demo are available at the Kemari Website

Kemari is listed on Xen Product Roadmap, and is asking for reviews and comments from the community.

We already mentionned Remus in earlier posts here at Virtualization.com and it seems the the Kemari and Remus project are planning to merge in order to to propose a better solution for Xen 3.4 together.