XenServer, split from Citrix, promises per-socket prices 'unlike certain other hypervisors' The server virtualization market has a new/old player that wants to make waves with keen pricing and a plan to improve its tech: XenServer. XenServer is a Citrix product the company acquired from XenSource in 2007 – a year in which server consolidation was all the rage and VMware had emerged as the market leader. XenServer …
This is the same XenServer that, being a commercial product, Citrix first made available in a functionally limited free version (like ESXi free), then made it completely open source in 2013 with XenServer 6.2, only to completely reverse course in I believe 2017, returning it into a closed-source product (but now without the free version)?
Not that XenServer was a great product to begin with, but why would anyone in their right mind pay money for it when when XEN itself has been close to death for a while, and, in the longer term, virtualization itself appears to be headed for the way of the dodo in favor of containers (with maybe kubevirt remaining for legacy VMs) as well?
TBH - Xen has been dead for a long time. It turns out that you need a proper kernel to run the system, and the Xen kernel just grew and grew as more stuff needed to get put in.
It's much better to use the real Linux Kernel and add a small amount of hypervisor logic into that...
Wasn't Xen originally an opensourse app from Cambridge computer Dept?
I seem to remember a fuss because they had an academic source license to Windows which made it possible. This was in the days when MSFT had less love for open source
The Original Xen was Linux, then they switched to virtualising Windows to make more money (even before Citrix bought them). There was work done in conjunction with Microsoft, but that was integration with Xen rather than the Xen/Linux parts.
A few months ago I gave xcp-ng a try, and all I can say is that it brought back some of the PTSD I got from using XenServer back in the day. The install process, supposedly simple, already didn't work (you first download and install xcp-ng itself which is little more than CentOS 7 Linux using a XEN kernel, and then go to the Xen Orchestra website and use the web interface to install the XOA management interface). After sorting that out manually I ended up with something that's at a level comparable to ESXi 4.
Considering that, as others have mentioned, XEN has been dead for a while, why would you waste time on xcp-ng when there are other non-dead options, such as KVM (including Proxmox) which are simple to install and use? Or really interesting stuff like Harvester, which looks to represent the future of virtualisation?
Heck, I'd rather use Hyper-V Server 2019 than xcp-ng in this day and age.
First, CentOS 7 is only used for the user space commands. The important part is the hypervisor (Xen) and the Dom0 kernel, both NOT coming from CentOS project, at all. They are built specifically for XenServer/XCP-ng (Xen with security patches backported and so on). The Linux kernel is also a supported LTS version.
"The install process didn't work": that's sad for you, but you can imagine if it didn't work at all, nobody could use it (I'm curious to understand why it didn't work for you BTW, because everything in the HCL and even a LOT more decent hardware works out of the box).
I think you maybe missed some options, because you can't sum up XCP-ng+XO as ESXiv4, especially considering all the backup and orchestration features, the central API, Terraform/Ansible support and many other things that are competitive vs any other platform.
But I have the feeling you were kind of already decided to tell that's garbage even before testing it…
Because Xen is a kernel of it's own rather than using Linux, "it doesn't work at all" is a very common experience.
Xen doesn't have the resources to support hardware in the way that Linux does (heck even Linux has a lot of hardware problems). It'd be a brave admin to risk relying on the Xen kernel supporting hardware in future... Does it even support TPM and UEFI Secure Boot yet? That stuff is going to be 100% of new hardware soon.
It's simply not true. Xen is a micro-kernel, only dealing with CPU and memory. All the device drivers are coming from… Linux, which is loaded in what we call the Dom0 (a dedicated VM with all permissions on the hardware). So your argument is simply not valid at all. Xen **never** had any device drivers, that was -since its own inception- the goal to rely on Linux to do that.
Regarding vTPM, first version is available on XCP-ng 8.3 pre-release, and UEFI secure boot is already working.
I hope it's more clear now.
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