Post to Twitter |
Comments (5) |
Views (19170) |
In ancient Greece, it was common for those seeking prophetic and spiritual wisdom to seek counsel from an Oracle, while in Zen Buddhism, a Zen master is one who offers spiritual guidance and teaching to others. Well, the Xen project can now offer both forms of wisdom - for virtualization at least: Xen.org today announced that Oracle has joined the Xen Project Advisory Board. Big deal? Yes. First, the Oracle appointee to xen.org is Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's "Mr Linux" (the Oracle of Linux, perhaps?) and the person behind the Oracle Unbreakable Linux effort. Wim is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, and a great leader of the open source cause. It's a pleasure to welcome him to the Xen AB. With him as an Oracle observer comes Dan Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team. These guys have done some heavy lifting for Xen, and the project will benefit from their leadership.
Oracle has become a major mover in the open source world. It's initial partnership with Red Hat has morphed into open competition, based on Oracle's own Enterprise Linux distribution that is both compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and (according to Oracle) more rigorously tested and for mission critical (Oracle, of course) database workloads. Like it or not, Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) plays an important role in delivering value to end users. First, it is available free, with optional support - unlike RHEL, for which source code is made available, as required by the GPL (so you can build it yourself), but not the binary product. This keeps an affordable enterprise Linux distribution within reach of the masses, and you can always buy support if you want it. Second, OEL is heavily tested (not that RHEL isn't) and validated for a demanding application workload. Oracle's Xen effort is quite different to OEL. Whereas Oracle Linux is a derivative of what Oracle euphemistically terms "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.
Perhaps more importantly, at a time when Red Hat's enthusiasm for bare metal virtualization is waning - and its focus on KVM accelerating - Oracle appears to be betting that the market will continue to adopt (a) a type 1 hypervisor and (b) in the form factor of a virtualization platform, as opposed to virtualization delivered in an OS. Contrast this with Xen in Linux or Hyper-V in Windows Server (which is type 1 delivered in an OS) and KVM on Linux or MSVS on Windows (which is type 2 - hosted virtualization).
Arguably Red Hat is being smart by offering both Xen in RHEL 5 and KVM (likely for RHEL 6) - leaving customers free to choose. But I think that they've missed the point: whether the technology is KVM or Xen in RHEL 5 the product will still offer OS based virtualization (competing with Hyper-V in Windows and Xen in SLES) whereas all of the other players in the market have opted for a platform based model independent of any OS. Finally, it is well known that Oracle only supports Oracle apps virtualized on Oracle VM, which is, as I said earlier, all but identical to mainline Xen. Is this a reasonable position? No, it's ridiculous. Hourly and daily regression tests on mainline Xen ensure that every guest ever built for Xen, and every application ever tested on Xen, is known to run perfectly. So Oracle's support position is nothing more than the Oracle brandwagon wielding its market muscle. It's a position that we in the Xen project hope to persuade Oracle to change over time - another good reason to welcome Oracle to the Xen AB. By contrast, SAP has an open virtualization partnering program and a rigorous validation and support program for SAP apps on 3rd party virtualization platforms. SAP is building a strong ecosystem of virtualization partners around its products to ensure that they run optimally and can be supported on any virtualization platform. Oracle would do well to learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem. Which is the final reason why it is great to welcome Oracle to the Xen Advisory Board.
Comments (5)
Dec 19, 2008
Massimo RE FERRE' says:
> KVM on Linux or MSVS on Windows (which is type 2 - hosted virtualization). ...> KVM on Linux or MSVS on Windows (which is type 2 - hosted virtualization).
Simon, is it fair to describe KVM as a type 2 hypervisor? The way I understand it is that they are leveraging legacy linux code (scheduler, memory manager etc etc) to do stuff that Xen, ESX, Hyper-V have been implementing from scratch.
We might certainly argue that the KVM implementation is less "focused" on the virtualization workload challenges since it is using some general purpose low level code (Vs XEN / ESX / HYPER-V code that have been designed specifically to overcome those challenges).
Having this said .. it appears to me more a type 1 hypervisor from an architectural perspective. I might be wrong though.
Not that it's important anyway... at the end of the day what's important is performance, scalability features etc etc .... if you could deliver those with a type "n" hypervisor (n = whatever number) that shouldn't be important. If we ask RH they would obviously say they could get more perf / more scalability, more features, more everything out of KVM than others could do with other implementations....
Thanks.
Massimo.
Dec 19, 2008
Simon Crosby says:
Massimo This is a good question. If you compare Xen in Linux and arguably...Massimo
This is a good question. If you compare Xen in Linux and arguably Hyper-V in Windows Server, that is a type 1 in the sense that the hypervisor owns the base hardware. You're right, the hypervisor has to perform scheduling, and manage all the system resources in an optimal way for the Dom0 / Parent Partition and the other guests. We in the Xen world believe that we can optimize system performance for virtualization specifically, in ways that a traditional Linux kernel cannot, but over time the difference will be moot. At the end of the day, the Linux camp adopting KVM is a fine idea for Linux, because it is more efficient from an engineering perspective (only one scheduler, one set of certs for native or virtual) and there is a lot of re-use. But for those of us in the virtualization platform business (XenServer, VMware, arguably Oracle VM) there is no need or desire to cart around a whole Linux distribution as our use model. If you look at the Dom0 kernel and "distro" that is used by the open source Xen Client Initiatvie, for example, you're looking at a system under 10MB total.
At the end of the day, this splits into just two differentiators: (1) what's the user's consumption model for virtualization - either as a platform that offers virtualization features primarily, and does so for all guest types or an OS that the user installs, and via that OS then instantiates more versions of that OS, and with some magic also gets other OSes to run as VMs; and (2) what is the vendor's primary goal - ours is to be nothing more than a virtualization platform - though we ship a debian template wth XenServer we definitely are not a Linux Distro - indeed most of our customers run Windows on XenServer. By contrast the RHEL ambition is to be a Linux Distro that can also do virtualization. KVM fits in very well with this latter model, since it is the easiest way to package virtualization for that model - from an engineering efficiency point of view.
Simon
Dec 19, 2008
Massimo RE FERRE' says:
Simon, thanks for your answer. I totally agree on your vision. Months ago I ...Simon,
thanks for your answer.
I totally agree on your vision. Months ago I came across an interesting post made by Anthony Liguori and he was expressing the same concept (from a Linux community perspective):
http://blog.codemonkey.ws/2008/05/truth-about-kvm-and-xen.html
In retrospective I think I was arguing something similar in this previous posts of mine:
http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2008/11/04/157.aspx
It really puts MS and VMware on the spotlight but it essentially frames the philosophies you mentioned (virtualization as a feature of the OS Vs virtualization as the OS itself) and it's applicable in general (respectively RH, Suse, for the former and Citrix XenServer, Virtualiron, OracleVM for the latter).
Thanks.
Massimo.
Dec 21, 2008
Anonymous says:
??????????
Anonymous replies:
Aug 12
Anonymous says:
The Xen Directions 2009 event was recently held in Berlin, Germany. Christian Ro...The Xen Directions 2009 event was recently held in Berlin, Germany. Christian Rothe from Oracle presented the topic of Xen Virtualization with Oracle: Commitment, Integration, Mission-critical Virtualization at the event. I'd like to summarize the key points in this presentation.
Oracle is committed to Linux and has contributed significantly to the open-source communities to help make Linux better. Oracle's Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux web hosting, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries. Oracle provides comprehensive indemnification for intellectual property claims raised against our customers, available to all Oracle-supported customers so that customers can deploy Linux with confidence. Moreover, Oracle has made significant technology contributions to the Linux as well as Xen community. You can see community contributions from Oracle at oss.oracle.com. There's nice blog The Real Story on Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
Add Comment