Xen hypervisor leaps into Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is embracing the Xen hypervisor, giving major clouds such as Google and Amazon a greater influence in the development of the open source technology. The announcement was made at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on Sunday, and sees the Xen project become a Linux Foundation …
Xen was dead when SuSE and Red Hat abandoned it in favor of KVM. Amazon forked Xen years ago and are now stuck as their changes are not compatible with the newer Xens (not the first time Amazon made that mistake by modifying software too much and not maintaining compatibility).
Only folks left using Xen are those that have been stuck using it. I've talked to many people at Citrix, they won't hesitate to recommend VMware. I commend them for that -- they freely admit that Xen is there for those that don't have the budget for VMware, but they fully acknowledge it's not in the same league. It's refreshing to see a company to own up to something like that (I say that as a Citrix customer - though not for Xen).
The Xen architecture is obsolete, it really always was. It's never been competitive, and now pretty much the entire open source community who was on that bandwagon got off of it years ago. The only reason why people hopped onto it is because they didn't want to fork over their $$ to vmware, not because it was ever a good product. Now that they have a promising product and architecture in KVM the future of open source hypervisors and clouds and shit looks much brighter (I say this as a vmware customer for the past 14 years).
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If Xen's "dead" and and "obsolete" can you then explain why large hosting companies such as Rackspace have based there Cloud Computing offerings on it? In the real world, Xen is a fundamentally simpler and more elegant architecture than KVM, which is frankly more suitable for a desktop running a single virtualised instance of Windows than a server running many instances of Windows, Linux, etc.
(Declaration of interests: I've consulted for Citrix, and have a lot of friends there.)
I've felt for some time that Xen would be better fit as an independent product, with the likes of Citrix layering products, services and consultancy on top of it; becoming, in effect, clients of Xen rather than holding ownership. To me, this is a great move. Once Xen has been properly established in an independent development track, and the market, rather than a single company, has been shown to drive development, this could mark a renaissance, and a solid alternative to KVM and VMWare.
... so much, it's the management functions. What makes and breaks vm platforms is all the dry stuff like scalability, storage, reliability, metrics, maintenance... VMware is not just there a quality hyper visor, it's the relevance customers can subscribe to: third party support with strong product lifecycles and features, all the key components of Total cost.
Now sure, Xen (and KVM) have a lot of cool stuff too, but they are not as simple to run for non-nixers and the like. Hence the take up of virtualbox despite Larry the Reaper's shadow, not to mention others fighting over the same bodily remains- eg devlish perpetrators like RedHat and MS shouting Hype through every hailer.
Besides the BSD kernel and stack has a lot to do with VMware's uptime advantage with paying customers. Once Linux can keep its pants up under serious load the KVM vs Xen debate will be an interesting one.
For reliability at any non-desktop level it still goes BSD, Nix/win, ie VMware, OSX plus VMware or parallels, nix or windows plus your choice of hypervisor. HyperV probably still competes with non-custom versions of Xen on non-custom kernels... Such as The ones amazon codes and deploys to maintain AWS uptimes.
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