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Ian Pratt, Citrix VP of Engineering, founder of the open source Xen.org community, and project leader of Xen.org was recently interviewed by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte of FLOSS Weekly. The recorded podcast is about 40 minutes long and can be accessed at http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/FLOSS-067.mp3.
This PodCast is a chance to learn about the origins of the Xen.org Xen Hypervisor project, how Cloud Computing was really behind its origins, and how the Xen.org community continues to drive the leading open source hypervisor.
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.
Anyone interested in learning more about the open source Xen solution built by the community at Xen.org can attend the North American Xen Summit in Boston, MA, June 23 - 24 as part of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference. The USENIX event is from June 22 - 27 with training sessions from the 22 - 24 and a conference from the 25 - 27. Plans are underway to host a day long Xen training session for the 22nd and include sessions from Xen Summit in the USENIX conference. A discount will also be offered to all Xen Summit attendees interested in going to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
More information on the event and registration information will be available soon; in the mean time, mark your calendars. Also, a European Xen Summit is also in the plans for later this year in London. Stay tuned...
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.