Blog posts tagged with 'ian pratt'
Last month I posted about Ian Pratt's presentation on the Xen Open Source Hypervisor at the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer's European Meeting) Conference. FOSDEM has posted videos of all the sessions. As the one of the primary founders of the Xen Open Source Hypervisor Project, Ian has unique insight into the Xen Project. http://video.fosdem.org/2008/maintracks/FOSDEM2008-xen.ogg
Ian Pratt
, one of the founders of the Xen Project, recently gave an inteview at FOSDEM.org about his recent talk at the FOSDEM 2008 conference. FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.
Here are a few snippets from the interview.
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.
You can read the entire interview at the FOSDEM.org site
. In the past FOSDEM events, videos of the talks have been posted. None of the 2008 talks are posted yet, but soon you should be able to download the video of the entire talk by Ian Pratt at the FOSDEM video site. UPDATE: You can now download a pdf of Ian's presentation at FOSDEM.org here.
In my blog post from the Xen Summit, I promised to follow up on the Xen Summit once the presentations were posted. Those presentations are now available on Xen.org. Here is a list of the presentations -
Introductory Comments and Xen Status/Roadmaps
Ian Pratt (Citrix, Cambridge), Project Status and Organization
Keir Fraser (Citrix, Cambridge), Roadmap and Releases
Xen Community: A Sampling of Status and Roadmaps
Todd Clayton (Sun), OpenSolaris, Xen and the xVM Project
Clyde Griffin (Novell), Novell Xen Roadmap
Jeremy Fitzhardinge (Citrix, Cambridge), Linux parvirtops status
Aron Griffix (HP), IA64 Update
Add One-half Xen and Stir Briskly
Mick Jordan (Sun), JavaGuest
Gerd Hoffman (Red Hat), Introducing Xenner (Abstract Only Available)
John Zulauf (Intel), Xen Extensions to Enable Modular/3P Device Emulation for HVM
Daniel Berrange(Red Hat), Directions for development & integration of Xen and QEMU
CPUs updates, scheduling, mobile
Tom Woller (AMD), AMD Update
Jun Nakajima (Intel), Intel Update
Scott Rixner (Rice University), Scheduling Pitfalls for I/O-intensive Guests
Sang-bum Suh, Secure Xen on ARM
Xen Networking
Greg Law (SolarFlare), The Convergence of Storage and Server Virtualization
Jose Renato Santos (HP), Netchannel2: Improving Xen Networking Performance
David Edmondson (Sun), OpenSolaris xVM Network Architecture
Xen Memory and Storage
Grzegorz Milos (Cambridge), Memory CoW in Xen
Hitoshi Matsumoto (Fujitsu), SCSI Support Status
Dutch T. Meyer (University of British Columbia), Parallax, A VM Storage Infrastruture
Xen Security
Vedvyas Shanbhogue(Intel), VIS:Virtualization-based Integrity Services
Derek Murray (University of Cambridge), Improving Xen security through domain-zero disaggregation
Joseph Cihula (Intel), Trusted Boot - Verifying the Xen Launch
Xen Deployment
Roman Marxer (Google) - A Xen Based High Availability Cluster)
Dave Lively (Virtual Iron), Running Xen Diskless
Brendan Cully (University of British Columbia), High Speed Checkpointing for High Availability
Donald Dugger (Intel), Updating Xen for the Client Environment
Padmashree K Apparao(Intel), Characterization and Analysis of a Server Consolidation Benchmark
Frank Martin (Oracle), Virtualization of Enterprise DataCenters Using Xen
As you can see from this list, 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.
I will be blogging about some of the individual presentations form the Fall 2007 Xen Summit later.
In my blog post from the Xen Summit, I promised to follow up on the Xen Summit once the presentations were posted. I put together a list of the presentations and presenters in this post. Now I would like to dig down into a few of the more interesting presentations. The first one I will discuss is the Project Update by Ian Pratt.
The first presentation of the Xen Summit was by Ian Pratt, founder of Xen. For those of you who are not familiar with Ian Pratt, here is bit of his bio -
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.
In addition to being on the faculty at Cambridge and leading the Xen hypervisor open source project, Ian Pratt is also VP of Advanced Projects for the VMD division of Citrix.
UPDATE: This project status and road map is specifically for the Xen open source hypervisor, not the Citrix XenServer product. While Citrix XenServer is built on top of the Xen open source hypervisor, it provides numerous additional management features on top of the Xen open source hypervisor.
Here is a bit of info from Ian's Xen Project Status Presentation at the Xen Summit -
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
UPDATE: I have received some questions about the status of the Xen Open Source project since the aquisistion. This project is going forward under the Xen Adfvisory Board, as mentioned above. The project is extremely active. As I mentioned in this earlier post, the Xen project is getting a great deal of industry wide participation.
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.
Another slide covers Xen Architectural's Advantages -
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)
Ian briefly covers the Xen Project Roadmap as well -
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
Xen vs ESX Performance
The last few slides from Ian's presentation include updated performance graphs from a recent XenServer Enterprise vs ESX performance test. XenSource did receive permission form VMWare to publish the ESX numbers, and you can find the compairson to XenEnterprise 3.2 here . Ian's slides have some newer graphs that included testing on an early beta of XenEnterprise v4 (though the chart legends were not updated).
Here are three graphs from the presentation -
XenServer Enterprise Compared to ESX 3.01 with RHEL5 running a Sun JVM
Windows 2003 Passmark CPU Results
Windows 2004 Passmark memory Results
As you can see, the performance of XenServer Enterprise v4 vs. ESX 3.01 is very similar, and in several cases, slightly better (at about 40% of the cost).
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