Tuesday, June 25, 2013 7:30 PMEvolving XenServer for the cloudLatest blog entries
Today I presented at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 in Santa Clara on evolving XenServer to better meet the needs of large-scale cloud deployments. XenServer started life as "XenEnterprise" in 2006 and was aimed at SMBs and Enterprises and targeted Windows IT pros who may not have Linux experience. Therefore a lot of the Linux structure of XenServer was hidden. With many cloud shops being Linux shops this hiding is a barrier; for example XenServer's non-standard installation model doesn't fit well with large scale server deployment and management tools like Chef and Puppet - XenServer is built on a standard Linux OS so why can't we deploy lit like a standard Linux OS?
I outlined some of the initiatives currently underway within Citrix that will continue under the xenserver.org project:
Hyperspace: fixing up the build and packaging to allow individual components to be easily built without complex build system requirements. Making XenServer be a "Linux distro+packages" where we take an off-the-shelf Linux distro, add the XenServer components as packages, and bundle the whole thing as XenServer.
Fusion (I called it "Project Upstream" in the presentation to avoid conflict with a commercial product name): getting libvirt and upstream qemu into XenServer.
Windsor: making XenServer more modular, exploiting dom0 disaggregation.
As we move more of XenServer project planning and development to xenserver.org I look forward to more discussion here on these initiatives and the wider topic of making XenServer the best platform for the cloud.
You can find a copy of my slides atCCC13_EvolvingXenServerForTheCloud_JamesBulpin_20130625.pdf
A video of the talk should be up on buildacloud.org soon.
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