Blog posts tagged with 'hypervisor'

VSM speaks with Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix XenServer, about Citrix XenServer development and release of XenServer 4.1
Podcast Summary:
Length: 11:18

• Introduction
• Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix XenServer (:10)
• New announcements and news about the release of XenServer 4.1 (:18)
• Citrix XenServer partnership with Netapp (2:13)
• XenServer 4.1 shipping now and available for download (5:35)
• Management of physical & virtual server environment from one location (6:30)
• Where XenServer stands now in the marketplace (8:03)
• Upcoming release of Microsoft hypervisor & how XenServer is working with Microsoft (9:20)
• For more information on Citrix XenServer (10:30)
• Close

Last time, XenSource was not yet acquired by Citrix. What were the reasons to consider this sale?

I think we were doing pretty well as XenSource, but one of the challenges we faced is that it takes time to build a 'sales channel' to distribute software. Citrix already have a great sales channel, so the acquisition provided a great opportunity to take Xen to the mass-market.

What kind of open-source commitment do you expect from Citrix?

Citrix have been great in supporting the open source side of things, funding folk to work full-time on open source Xen, and also funding a full time Xen programme manager. The management understand the importance of a strong Xen community and the need for the project's independence from Citrix's own Xen products.

The change was always going to make some members of the community nervous (just like when we originally formed XenSource), but it's the same group of people and we intend to carry on just as before. One difference is that we now have 'xen.org' to provide a clear independent identity for the Xen project, and also the Xen Advisory Board to help govern the project.

How does Xen's future look on Windows platforms?

Lots of people use Xen to run Windows VMs -- after all, Windows arguably needs virtualization more than Unix OSes. I reckon that something like over 80% of the VMs running on XenServer are Windows.

We began using Xen in Fall 2003 soon after reading the paper "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" published in the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). After attending SOSP and talking to some of the authors, Jeanna Matthews returned excited about Xen. She and her graduate operating systems course at Clarkson University decided to repeat and extend the results reported in that paper. That class included two of the co-authors for this book, Eli Dow (currently at IBM) and Todd Deshane (currently completing his Ph.D.), who were both studying for their Master's degrees at the time. In the process of repeating the results from the 2003 Xen paper, we learned a lot about running Xen - much of it the hard way! Our goal for this book was to write exactly the material we wished was available when we first started using Xen.

In July 2004, we published the paper "Xen and the Art of Repeated Research" describing our experience with Xen and presenting the results we obtained repeating and extending the results. All the authors, in addition to being a part of the Fall 2003 graduate operating systems course, were also members of the Applied Computing Laboratories at Clarkson University specifically the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI) and the Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL). These labs were founded to provide students with hands-on experience with cutting-edge computing technologies and to form a community in which everyone both learns and teaches. Other students in the labs - both graduate and undergraduate - began to use Xen as the basis for both production systems and for research projects. Through the years, we have used Xen as the basis for a number of academic papers as well as the basis of award winning team projects. In the process, we have learned a lot about running Xen. It is our goal in this book to share this knowledge with you and to make your experience running Xen as smooth and simple as possible.

• Chapter 1 - Xen: Background and Virtualization Basics
• Chapter 2 - A Quick Tour with the Xen LiveCD
• Chapter 3 - The Xen Hypervisor
• Chapter 4 - Hardware Requirements and Installation of Xen Dom0
• Chapter 5 - Using Prebuilt Guest Images
• Chapter 6 - Managing Unprivileged Domains
• Chapter 7 - Populating Guest Images
• Chapter 8 - Storing Guest Images
• Chapter 9 - Device Virtualization and Management
• Chapter 10 - Network Configuration
• Chapter 11 - Securing a Xen System
• Chapter 12 - Managing Guest Resources
• Chapter 13 - Guest Save, Restore, and Migration
• Chapter 14 - Xen in the Enterprise: A Brief Survey
• Appendix A - Resources
• Appendix B - The xm command
• Appendix C - Xend Configuration Parameters
• Appendix D - Guest Configuration Parameters
• Appendix E - Xen Performance Evaluation

1. CiRBA

CiRBA's Data Center Intelligence Software can help IT leaders analyze and visually map how to migrate and consolidate servers to a virtualized environment. For instance, CiRBA's tools help you figure out which servers and applications can coexist efficiently. The tools analyze factors such as application middleware, database configurations, required service levels and workload patterns. Then CiRBA's tools can help manage the virtualized environment.

CiRBA's patent pending analysis and visualization technology provides simultaneous multi-dimensional analysis of:

• What could go together: Detailed hardware, OS, Application middleware and Database Configurations
• What should go together: Non-technical/business/resource factors such as change windows, service levels, geography and others
• What fits together: Workload patterns across CPU, Network IO, Disk IO, Memory and others

Podcast Summary:
Length: 14:34

1. Introduction
2. Benefits of CiRBA
3. The Three main pillars
4. Choosing the right strategy
5. The devils in the details
6. Monitoring and Reporting
7. Preventing Image sprawl
8. Our Customers
9. Why use CiRBA?
10. Storage Analysis
11. What Next?
12. Closing

CiRBA is announcing version 4.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) suite this week, whose new graphical visualization capabilities allow IT managers to quickly identify which servers in their environment can be virtualized on to which servers.

Capacity planning tools are especially important in very large server environments, said Andrew Hillier, CiRBA co-founder and CTO. "If you have 50 servers in a lab and virtualize them, chances are it will just work. But a lab is relatively free of constraints," he said. But if you have 2,000 servers, "virtualization is a big opportunity to make a mess."

Expert accolades

CiRBA's unique technology has garnered significant recognition within the analyst and press community, including:

• CiRBA was named to Network World's "10 Management Companies to Watch" list in October 2006 and to the publication's 10 IT Management Companies Still Worth Watching" " list in September 2007.
• Burton Group's Senior Analyst Chris Wolf noted: "CiRBA has yet to reach the same market share as PlateSpin, but CiRBA's emergence as the dominant P2V planning tool is only a matter of time."
• Forrester Research Senior Analyst Evelyn Hubbert: "This is going to be something the big guys will want to have as virtualization adoption moves more aggressively into production."

Podcast Summary:

• Introduction
• Simon Crosby, Founder and CTO, XenSource (:05)
• Busy integrating XenSource into Citrix (:13)
• Virtualization Management Division delivering entire solutions (:37)
• XenServer optimized to run Presentation Server (1:00)
• XenServer OEM component of Citrix XenDesktop - VDI Broker (1:15)
• XenServer and Provisioning Server (1:37)
• How Microsoft's partnership with Citrix will affect XenSource when Viridian hypervisor is released (4:15)
• How VDI will affect server virtualization side of XenSource (6:44)
• Sales activity since acquisition by Citrix (7:58)
• What's Next: Citrix Summit08 coming soon and Citrix XenServer in beta (9:42)
• Close

Enter Simon Crosby. Once a tenured professor at Cambridge University, he's traded the ethereal heights of academia for the cutthroat arena of high tech, driven by the belief that "virtualization has got to be everywhere," he says.

As former CTO of XenSource and now CTO of Citrix Systems' virtualization and management division, Crosby has raised the profile of the open source Xen hypervisor as a viable competitor to market leader VMware, while advocating for the hypervisor-any hypervisor-to replace the OS as the key interface between applications and hardware.

 ...

IW:With Citrix's acquisition of XenSource earlier this year, XenSource has the resources of Citrix behind it. How relevant is the Xen project open source hypervisor being developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory?

Crosby:It's more relevant that before. Xen was about a core thesis of a business model-if the hypervisor is ubiquitous, there's a huge opportunity for the software industry to deliver value-added software for the dynamism and manageability of enterprise IT. Multiple vendors can take Xen and bring it to market. So the strategic nature has turned it into open source as reference standard for implementation.

IW:In a recent blog post you said that at the time XenSource was acquired, your foremost concern was that Citrix would respect the Xen community and strengthen the project. How do you keep Citrix from having undue influence on the Xen project?

Crosby: We've moved the Xen project into a separate .org. It has an oversight committee composed of all the major contributors.

IW: Who's on the committee?

Crosby:The key vendors there are IP, HP, Intel, Red Hat, Novel, Sun and ourselves. It's those who are delivering the hypervisor to the market and who are interested in a careful description of what is and is not Xen. Those companies establish policies and procedures and oversight of the code base by fiat.

Q: The XenSource applications are based on open source. In terms of the virtualization market, what are the pluses or minuses of an open source approach?

Open source is an extremely valuable tool for innovation. One of the key things about the Xen code base is that it can be delivered to market by multiple vendors, and will be.

... So the day that the first Intel VT CPU ships, we have the support. The day the hardware virtualization [launches] we have the support. So we've become the industry's first and best support for an enhanced hardware experience.

And at the same time, we've been very anxious to make sure that Xen as an engine was open sourced, but that multiple different vendors could have economic business models built around that. So we commoditize the "engine" - it's the code base that everyone agrees should be commoditized - and then it has much broader applicability.

So, for example, Xen runs on [certain] PDAs, and Samsung is doing work with those as a product prototype. But it also runs on supercomputers from SGI. That way, we don't have just one 'car' - there's everything from Porches to Minis. So you don't limit its applicability.

*Q: What about the relationship between the Xen hypervisor and Microsoft's Viridian? How will that work?*

Microsoft implements the Viridian hypervisor as an add-in operating system component. The architecture of Viridian is very similar to Xen, but it is Microsoft-built - entirely.

And so the way to think about Viridian with Windows Server 2008 is pretty much like Red Hat does with Xen, or Novell does with Xen, or now Sun is doing with Xen with Solaris 10. So it's a hypervisor included with the OS, which is basically the Xen architecture, but written by Microsoft. We have a partnership with Microsoft to make sure that Viridian interoperates with the world.

In fact, the partnership with Microsoft is extremely strong, and getting stronger. They're important in the context of Citrix, and very important in the context of the integrated hypervisor, the embedded hypervisor, which will be shipped by Dell as of the beginning of next year...

Microsoft Corp. and XenSource Inc. today announced they will cooperate on the development of technology to provide interoperability between Xen™-enabled Linux and the new Microsoft® Windows® hypervisor technology-based Windows Server® virtualization. With the resulting technology, the next version of Windows Server, code-named "Longhorn," will provide customers with a flexible and powerful virtualization solution across their hardware infrastructure and operating system environments for cost-saving consolidation of Windows, Linux and Xen-enabled Linux distributions.

"Microsoft's commitment to customers is to build bridges across the industry with solutions that are interoperable by design," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "Our work with XenSource, a recognized leader in open source virtualization technology, reflects that commitment and Microsoft's ongoing efforts to bring virtualization solutions to the mainstream and help customers progress toward self-managing dynamic systems."

"We are pleased to collaborate with Microsoft as a development partner and to deliver interoperable virtualization solutions," said Peter Levine, president and CEO of XenSource. "Xen-enabled guests will run seamlessly on XenEnterprise now, and, as a result of this agreement, Xen-enabled Linux guests will also run on Windows Server virtualization. XenSource will also deliver additional products based on the collaboratively developed technology, further expanding the value of the relationship."

Microsoft and XenSource to Develop Interoperability for Windows Server Longhorn Virtualization

What exactly is being done between Microsoft and XenSource?
Microsoft and XenSource have signed an agreement to collaboratively develop and deliver virtualization
technology enabling interoperability between Xen-enabled systems and Windows Server "Longhorn"
virtualization. Specifically, select Xen-enabled guest operating systems, including Linux, will be able to run
virtualized on Windows Server "Longhorn" Virtualization and will be supported by Microsoft.

Does XenSource have additional plans based on the developed code?
XenSource intends to build and sell additional future products based on the collaboratively developed code.
XenSource will deliver additional value-added products that apply equally well to virtualized Linux or Windows
operating systems hosted on both Windows Server virtualization and XenEnterprise. Additionally, XenSource
will ensure interoperability of Windows Server guests running on XenEnterprise.

*Q: If there's a hypothetical IT buyer out there who's considering both VMware and XenSource, what would you say to direct them?*

...

I think VMware has fantastic products, they have their reputation, but there's no reason to be paying through your nose to do virtualization. We have fantastic products, and they will be delivered in a much cheaper, much more useful form factor when they're just included with every server.

It would be reasonable to say that we as XenSource, as a small company, have the enterprise cred, and the legs to stand on. We're a very strategic company. We now have 24/7 worldwide support, we have all of the scale, all of the resources, all of the partnerships, and all of the features that VMware has. So there's no reason not to consider us as a platform of choice.

Ian Pratt is the leader and chief architect of the Xen project, which he founded in 2001 with the aim of making virtualization ubiquitous on scale-out hardware, and was a founder of XenSource. Ian has played a key role in both the architecture of Xen and formation of industry partnerships that led to the emergence of Xen as the open source virtualization technology. Ian is a member of Senior faculty at the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University, UK, where he has led Systems Research for 7 years. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, and was elected a Fellow of Kings College in 1996. Ian was a founder of Nemesys Research, acquired by FORE Systems, and has consulted widely in the technology industry.

Creation of the new Xen Project Avisory Board and Xen.org

Members of the Xen Advisory Board include the following

• Citrix
• IBM
• Intel
• HP
• Novell
• Red Hat
• Sun

The Xen Project Mission Statement is -

Build the industry standard open source hypervisor
- Core "engine" that is incorporated into multiple vendors' products
• Maintain our industry-leading performance
- Be first to exploit new hardware acceleration features
- Help OS vendors paravirtualize their OSes
• Maintain our reputation for stability and quality
- Security must now be paramount
• Support multiple CPU types; big and small systems
- From server to client to mobile
• Foster innovation
- Be a great platform for research and experimentation
• Drive interoperability
- Between Xen-based products
- With other virtualization products

there is wide industry participation in the Xen hypervisor open source project. In this Xen Summit alone there were six presentations from Intel, three presentations from Sun and Red Hat, and two from HP and three from Citrix. In the Spring 2007 Xen Summit, there were eight presentations by IBM, three presentations by HP, two presentations by AMD, three by Red Hat, and seven by XenSource/Citrix. The Xen Open Source hypervisor is pulling in the creativity, innovation, knowledge and experience of a wide range of industry heavyweights. This effort is completely focused on building a highly scalable, stable and a powerful 64 bit virtualization engine.

 Xen's true hypervisor architecture enables
excellent security and scalability
• Lightweight service domains
- I/O driver domains and utility domains
- Device emulation domains
- Domain building / measurement domains
• Allows efficient large SMP scalability
• Minimum privilege, small TCB
- De-privilege and disaggregate domain 0
True hypervisor design
- Small privileged component, principle of least privilege
• Secure compartmentalization
- Grant tables allow controlled sharing
• Optimized as a hypervisor
• Cross-platform: x86, ia64, Power and ARM
• OS agnostic: Windows, Linux, Solaris, *BSD
• Flexible to enable domain0 disaggregation
- Control-plane OS (e.g. OpenBSD or MiniOS)
- Driver domains
- Service domains (e.g. virus scanners, firewalls etc)

Server
- Performance and scalability optimizations
- Enable Smart IO devices
- SCSI pass-through

• Security
- Domain0 disaggregation; XSM Xen Security Modules
- Secure boot, TPM, certification, multi-level secure systems

• Client
- Power management
  Suspend and hibernate; Clock management
- 3D video
   direct h/w access; high-performance guest virtualization
- USB device pass-through

after attending a summary of the recent Citrix iForum it became clear that XenServer will pose a significant challenge in all areas to the VMware offering asthe resources of Citrix are integrated to the XenServer platform as the products mature.    

it may be a good idea to determine the differences from the management side between VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer Enterprise edition. There are some differences, and as the next release of XenServer that has had the Citrix touch on the whole build, there should be some exciting new features that will surely give VMware a challenge for the best enterprise virtualization product. Regardless, we all win, as a better suite of products will be made available to the enterprise