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.

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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 -

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 -

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.

Another slide covers Xen Architectural's Advantages -

Ian briefly covers the Xen Project Roadmap as well -

  

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

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Windows 2003 Passmark CPU Results

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Windows 2004 Passmark memory Results

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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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Momentum around application virtualization continues to build. Natalie Lambert, an analyst with Forrester recently wrote an excellent article on the virtualization landscape. It does a good job of laying out the challenges that organizations are struggling with and how more and more of them are turning to virtualization as an alterntive. If you have access to the report, it's worth the time. Check it out here.

Nick Rintalan from Citrix Consulting Services has pulled together some hard-earned lessons learned from the field into a Best Practices guide. Check it out on the Knowledge Base.

Update: 

The utility has been released to CDN. Here is the link

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Hi my name is Ray Yang. I am a senior technical business development manager at Citrix. The new official Citrix blog site displays my name as Ruiguo Yang. But most people at Citrix refer me simply as Ray Yang. That was the name I used for the old community blog.

I haven't posted anything new recently because I've been busy working on an exciting new project called "Citrix Power Smart".

So what's "Citrix Power Smart"?

Nowadays, server power consumption and associated cooling cost have been a hot issue. Many people in Citrix and Citrix customers are asking what Citrix can do to help addressing this issue.

During a discussion with some members of the CTO Office team, a small group of us conceived the idea of powering off idle presentation server during off peak hours.  Here is our thought process.

Just imagine you have 10 presentation servers.  During the business hours they are fully utilized. However at nights or on weekends hardly anyone connects to them. These servers however still consume power needlessly during such "off business hours".  Simply powering off such servers during "off business hours" can save you up to 30-50% of your presentation server farm power consumption based on our rough estimate.  It sounds easy. But why haven't we found many people doing so? Many of them do want to save money and are environmentally conscious. We think one of the reasons is that it has to be made easy and reliably before such practice is widely adopted. Can you imagine the following scene?

A presentation server administrator stays late every night.

Wait for the last person to log off.

Shut down each idle server.

Get up early to power on all servers before everyone else comes to work.

It's a bit tough to do, isn't it?

Well, such repetitive work is best left for computers. And they can be programmed to do it reliably!

In fact, we realized that the existing presentation server and the underling server platforms have the necessary ingredients already. The existing Presentation Server SDK provides the ability to see what user sessions are running on a given presentation server. There are existing standards such as IPMI and infrastructure such as Windows Remote Management available to power on/off servers reliably. What's missing is a small piece of software to tie them together.

But wait a minute. What if some poor fellow do have to check emails or get some work done during the "off business hours"? You can leave some Presentation Servers running to serve them. However without additional work, the default Presentation Server load balancer will typically distribute the load evenly across all the servers preventing many servers to be shut down. To give you an example, say you have 10 servers in your farm. Each server is capable of supporting 50 concurrent user sessions.  Based on historical data, you expect at most 30 concurrent user sessions will be needed during "off business hours". So I only need to keep one server running after business hour then. But wait. You have set up your presentation servers to balance user load evenly across your servers. These 30 user sessions will be spread across all 10 servers during "off business hours" preventing you from shutting them down. After all you don't want to lose your job because you disconnect your CEO's session when he is checking an important email at home.

So how can we improve our simple algorithm? Well, it turns out that Presentation Server has a "scheduling rule" for all the currently supported versions. You can define the time periods when certain servers are available. Perfect, we thought. If we add a simple scheduling rule, to make sure the servers we want to shut down aren't going to accept new connections in "off business hours", chances are much greater that these servers will have zero active sessions as people log off.

"Sounds great and simple. We have App Delivery Expo coming up next month. It's going to be a great talking point. Can you have it done, like tomorrow?" Marketing guys asked.

"Well, we like it but it is likely going to take XXX man weeks to go through the release cycle. And we are fully booked" answered development team.

Finally, the technical folks in the business development group volunteered to deliver the first version via Citrix Developer Network with forum support. Because of my developer background, I volunteered to lead the project. We volunteered because we love doing something good for the environment, sooner than later. And we believe once we showed the leadership and initiative, the community (users and partners) will help us get there even if the initial functionality is limited. And it is easier to convince the product team to include such features in the future releases once we have positive feedbacks from users. Personally it is gratifying to be able to contribute to something I believe in while getting paid 

Thus "Citrix Power Smart for Presentation Server" project is born.

At this year's "App Delivery Expo" (AKA IForum), we announced "Power Smart" initiative. Here is the link to the press release. If this project is successful, we may bring more exciting projects under this model. For example, a Power Smart Utility for Xen. Since then we've got many interests from partners and customers. I may be able to share some more information on that subject later.

We know Presentation Server very well. But we are not the experts in controlling the physical servers such as powering on/off servers. Luckily we found some like-minded folks at one of our great partners HP to help us. HP's development team is busy too. But they gratefully provided advices and test equipments to allow us deliver a solution that will work with HP servers. And they happily agreed to do joint marketing with us. It's been a pleasure working with the HP team involved with this project so far.

I've been itching to share more information with Citrix community about this project. But I felt I had to get the utility working and release it on schedule first.  I am still running some last minutes testing and getting feedbacks from selected beta users.  It now looks promising that we will have the utility delivered to the community as a New Year gift from Citrix.

I will share more details with you as we make progress.

In the mean time, I'd love to hear from you, good or bad. If you prefer, you can also send an email to me at Ray.Yang@citrix.com. I can't promise to respond to every email. But I will try. For this reason, I would encourage you to comment on my blog or soon to be setup user forum to exchange your ideas with the broader community. Let's do something good, together!

I hope you find this blog interesting. And if you do, please help us spread the message.

Thanks!