Olivier Lambert

Open Source virtualization is almost 20 years old. Obviously, things have evolved a lot in that time: the public cloud, new CPU architectures, new storage technologies, and more.

What about the real, on-the-ground usage? Sysadmins, Ops and Devops are not leveraging virtualization the same way today as they did before. But what really changed? In what direction is it evolving? Is on-premise open source virtualization still relevant today?

Through our own journey as engineers of an open source virtualization platform, we'll give you an inside look into what our users are requesting from us, and what we did to modernize our virtualization stack based on the Xen hypervisor.

Because virtualization is everywhere, new challenges in the IT world are revealing that this crucial component has to be improved on a regular basis. This requires a lot of coordination between Open Source projects as well as intense research and development efforts.

NVMe storage performance revealing hidden bottlenecks, Intel CPU flaws changing the security landscape regarding isolation, increasing complexity of stacks requiring more and more components working together, hardware specialization, new protocols, new use cases on top (k8s): these are a few of the challenges that a virtualization platform must answer in 2020.

We'll first see a landscape of these new challenges, then the possible approaches to solve them, and finally a concrete example of what the XCP-ng project is doing to integrate all these changes in a fully Open Source fashion, inside a turnkey Xen distro.

Creating a new virtualization platform in 2018 seems intriguing. Why doing something like this? Is anyone would be interested? XCP-ng answered those questions in a clear manner. Initially a fork of XenServer, XCP-ng made something some people thought would be impossible: gathering a large community around a new virtualization platform in those modern days, where containers and serverless are advertised as the only way to build a decent IT infrastructure.

XCP-ng is a fully Open Source and turnkey virtualization platform. In other words, a specialized Linux distro, with everything you need to run your virtual machines on it, without complicated installation and configuration. We'll see why it was born in the first place, what happened since and the future of it.

XenServer exposes a fully featured management API called XAPI. Xen Orchestra was originally designed as web interface for Xen in 2009, and is now a complete re-write to leverage all those new possibilities.

This is the story of a tool evolving from "simple hypervisor management" to a "Infrastructure as a Service" interface, with all the challenges involved.

First, we will examine architecture choices of Xen Orchestra (to reduce connections, bandwidth waste, storing of structured data, allowing persistence and so on...), then and how we decide to address common problems, like user permissions and ACLs in a virtualized infrastructure. Finally, we'll see the roadmap of this fully open source project (aGPLv3)

XCP exposes a fully featured management API called XAPI. But today, there is no active open source project providing a web GUI which uses XAPI to it's full potential. Xen Orchestra was originally designed as web interface for Xen in 2009, and is undergoing a complete re-write to fill this gap.

XCP exposes a fully featured management API called XAPI. But today, there is no active open source project providing a web GUI which uses XAPI to it's full potential. Xen Orchestra was originally designed as web interface for Xen in 2009, and is undergoing a complete re-write to fill this gap.

First, we will examine interesting features of XAPI, such as events, pools etc. that allow easy administration of virtualized environment. Then, we will see how these features fit into the Xen Orchestra architecture, which has been completely redesigned to reduce connections, bandwidth waste, storing of structured data, allowing persistence and so on. Finally, we will show how we display all that information (ergonomics choices from an ergonomist). We will conclude quickly on how you can engage and contribute to the Xen Orchestra project and make sure it helps fulfil your needs.