4 ms·

XenServer open sourced

123 points by ke4qqq 13y ago

laveur 13y ago
You know I always figured that this was just open source to begin with.... I guess I was wrong.
- pestaa 13y ago
  The article mentions the Xen hypervisor was indeed open source all along, just the full-blown XenServer had proprietary components.
- sciurus 13y ago
  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 http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XCP/XenServer_Feature_Matrix https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin
  - patrickg_zill 13y ago
    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.
    - eru 13y ago
      > It is based on OCaml, IIRC. Yes, that's true. They also have some Haskell developers, but they are working on XenClient, not XenServer.
- changdizzle 13y ago
  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.
  - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
    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 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.
sciurus 13y ago
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/categories/listings/xenserver-org-launch.html http://xenserver.org/discuss-virtualization/q-and-a/categori...
- sciurus 13y ago
  s/XenCenter/XenServer/g
mstermagoo 13y ago
If you're interested Intel had a POV to add. http://communities.intel.com/community/datastack/blog/2013/06/25/not-your-mothers-open-source http://communities.intel.com/community/datastack/blog/2013/0... FD: I work at Intel in the Data Center Group
TheRubyist 13y ago
Seems like PR move for Intel and Cytrix to bring some interest to technology
- edelwe1ss 13y ago
  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.
Nux 13y ago
Nice! The power of competition proven once again.
revnja 13y ago
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!

123 points by ke4qqq 13y ago

laveur 13y ago

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

pestaa 13y ago
The article mentions the Xen hypervisor was indeed open source all along, just the full-blown XenServer had proprietary components.
sciurus 13y ago
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 http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XCP/XenServer_Feature_Matrix https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin https://github.com/xenserver/xenadmin
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  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.
  - eru 13y ago
    > It is based on OCaml, IIRC. Yes, that's true. They also have some Haskell developers, but they are working on XenClient, not XenServer.
changdizzle 13y ago
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.
- Patrick_Devine 13y ago
  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 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.

sciurus 13y ago

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/categories/listings/xenserver-org-launch.html http://xenserver.org/discuss-virtualization/q-and-a/categori...

sciurus 13y ago
s/XenCenter/XenServer/g

mstermagoo 13y ago

If you're interested Intel had a POV to add. http://communities.intel.com/community/datastack/blog/2013/06/25/not-your-mothers-open-source http://communities.intel.com/community/datastack/blog/2013/0... FD: I work at Intel in the Data Center Group

TheRubyist 13y ago

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

edelwe1ss 13y ago
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.

Nux 13y ago

Nice! The power of competition proven once again.

revnja 13y ago

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!