{"id":72,"date":"2008-07-04T10:54:23","date_gmt":"2008-07-03T21:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/?p=72"},"modified":"2008-07-04T10:54:23","modified_gmt":"2008-07-03T21:54:23","slug":"citrix-on-xen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/2008\/07\/04\/citrix-on-xen\/","title":{"rendered":"Citrix on Xen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that the original <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brianmadden.com\/blog\/BrianMadden\/Prediction-Citrix-will-drop-the-open-source-Xen-hypervisor-for-Hyper-V\">subject<\/a> of my post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/2008\/07\/02\/citrix-xenserver-xen-or-hyper-v-does-it-matter\/\">yesterday<\/a> caught the eyes of much of the virtualisation community, including Simon Crosby, formerly from Xensource, and now working for Citrix.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s written a typically well thought out <a href=\"http:\/\/community.citrix.com\/display\/~simoncr\/2008\/07\/02\/Xen+is+Dead!+Long+Live+Xen!\">response<\/a>, which covers off a lot of points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>HP have a multi-hypervisor <a href=\"http:\/\/h18004.www1.hp.com\/products\/servers\/proliantessentials\/valuepack\/vms\/\">management tool<\/a> already which signs off on Xenserver, VMWare and Hyper-V support<\/li>\n<li>Xenserver Platinum, which is comprised of Xenserver Enterprise and Citrix Provisioning Server, can already provision VMs to not only physical hardware and Xenserver, but to other hypervisors as well<\/li>\n<li>He covered off again the ecosystem building around the Xenserver product range, specifically in HA areas &#8211; products like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marathontechnologies.com\/high_availability_xenserver.html\">Marathon Everrun<\/a> and Stratus <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stratus.com\/products\/avance\/index.htm\">Avance<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He also wrote up a good bit on the position of Xen with regards to KVM. I haven&#8217;t really looked into KVM much, due to not ready access to test hardware with VT capable chips (the test hardware I do have is tied up with testing Xenserver), but I&#8217;ve always been wary of various claims that it&#8217;s a better VM stack than Xen is. (That might just be because I&#8217;ve not spent the time looking into it, and it might be because of the general not-invented-here feeling the &#8220;linux kernel&#8221; community seems to have about Xen. Again, not something I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time on). A lot of the stuff Simon writes is high level and enthusiastic of course, but it paints a clear picture &#8211; Xen already has massive uptake in mindset, and not just with traditional linux vendors either (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sun.com\/software\/products\/xvm\/index.jsp\">Sun xVM<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oracle.com\/technologies\/virtualization\/index.html\">Oracle VM<\/a> having Xen based stacks as well).  I guess the jury might still be out on which technology actually is technically superior, but as history <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Betamax\">demonstrates<\/a>, it&#8217;s not always the technically superior technology that lasts.<\/p>\n<p>Simon also claims that Xen will be in the BIOS hypervisor offering from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virtualization.info\/2007\/11\/phoenix-technologies-confirms-hypercore.html\">Phoenix<\/a>, which is something I haven&#8217;t heard before. It certainly makes some amount of sense for Phoenix to not rewrite an entire hypervisor stack and then stick it some place that&#8217;s inherently difficult to upgrade &#8211; your BIOS, but I&#8217;m not sure how it works out regarding Xen&#8217;s requirement for a privileged Xen-aware guest to provide hardware drivers.<\/p>\n<p>Simon also makes another point that I must have heard before from him, because it&#8217;s stuck with me and I agree entirely with the premise:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nThe founding thesis of XenSource, and the continued strategy at Citrix, is to promote fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous hypervisor based virtualization.  <strong>If the hypervisor is free, why worry about who delivers it?<\/strong>  Let the customer pick the implementation method that they want &#8211; the real money is in the up-sell with products that make virtualization valuable for customers.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Whether you like it that companies are in this to make money or not, this approach seems a good one. Piggybacking their moneymaking on an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xen.org\/\">opensource<\/a> product, an action which drives development, acceptance and that horrible word &#8220;mindshare&#8221;, doesn&#8217;t have to be a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that the original subject of my post yesterday caught the eyes of much of the virtualisation community, including Simon Crosby, formerly from Xensource, and now working for Citrix. He&#8217;s written a typically well thought out response, which covers off a lot of points: HP have a multi-hypervisor management tool already which signs off [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meta.net.nz\/~daniel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}