XenServer open sourced | Hacker News Reader

XenServer open sourced

blog.xen.org

123 pointske4qqq14 comments

This isn't an announcement of future plans; open-source XenCenter 6.2 was released today. This is a pleasant surprise, because I'm actually early in the process of deploying some servers running Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). Now that XenCenter is open source there won't be any more XCP releases, but upgrading from XCP to XenCenter is supported.

This and other questions I had were answered at http://xenserver.org/discuss-virtualization/q-and-a/categori...

s/XenCenter/XenServer/g

If you're interested Intel had a POV to add. http://communities.intel.com/community/datastack/blog/2013/0...

FD: I work at Intel in the Data Center Group

This is pretty big news. I've known some small businesses that have had a need to virtualize, but didn't want to get into everything KVM/OpenVZ, etc entailed. The VMware Essentials bundle (I believe that is what it is called) made decent inroads in this arena, but with everything all the enterprise features being free, I will probably have to start recommending this.

I have been looking into breaking in to a specialized segment of lower-end hosting (VPS, etc) and was looking to base my platform on VMware (rather than OpenVZ/KVM which seems to be the norm) but I am going to take a serious look at this now.

I'm excited to try building the platform around XenServer, and excited to contribute to the project as well -- I hope we see a lot of contributions now that this is open-source. I would love to see a Linux or OS X version of the management client, which is wholly possible now.

I'm installing a test instance of 6.2 now (within ESXi, ironically) to play around with it!

You know I always figured that this was just open source to begin with.... I guess I was wrong.

The article mentions the Xen hypervisor was indeed open source all along, just the full-blown XenServer had proprietary components.

Most of the software was already open source, but the pay-for version of XenServer had a few more features than the open source Xen Cloud Platform.

Somewhat to my surprise, Citrix also released the XenCenter management application under an open source license. It would be nice to see a port of that to linux.

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XCP/XenServer_Feature_Matrix

https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin

the API , called XAPI, that the management application uses, has always been public and open source, as far as I know. It is based on OCaml, IIRC.

> It is based on OCaml, IIRC.

Yes, that's true. They also have some Haskell developers, but they are working on XenClient, not XenServer.

Yeah, Xen was always open source but XenServer Essentials was the premium component that people paid for - stuff like GSLB, HA, storage management, etc

Similar to how VMWare gave away View for free to eat at Citrix's XenDesktop market share, Citrix decided to do the same on the Hypervisor side.

I think Citrix does two things with this; it potentially stops losing more market share to KVM, particularly in regards to OpenStack, and it also will potentially eat in to ESX market share. In the last slides I saw at http://personal.crocodoc.com/4YprKmn KVM was at 71% of deployed OpenStack installations and Xen was at a combined 13%.

FD: I've worked at VMware for the last 11 years and have worked on ESX since 1.5.

Seems like PR move for Intel and Cytrix to bring some interest to technology

I am not convinced : this looks like a serious effort and if you take it together with the move of Xen > Linux Foundation, it actually makes sense. Previous attempts to open source bits of XenServer though, do look like PR moves which frankly created a bit of a mess.

Nice! The power of competition proven once again.

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