back to article Developer plots server virtualization comeback for XenServer

Moves are afoot to revive Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), the open source version of XenServer that existed independently of Citrix before the company released its code to the Xen Project and made its own efforts open source. In 2017’s dying days developer Olivier Lambert posted news of his plan to revive XCP as “XCP-ng”. Lambert …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

    Seriously, what's the point of this project? XenServer has an extremely limited hardware compatibility list, a weak feature set, and no real third-party support. At best you could say that it is has a few niche historical uses.

    Given the complexity of the features that aren't in the XenServer Free version (anyone care to implement NVidia and AMD GPU virtualization support this weekend?), I doubt that this will be a long term success, although you could say "emergency stop-gap".

    If all they are trying to achieve is to resurrect the management APIs of XenServer, they're better off just adding any missing bits to libvirt.

    People need to wake up and smell the coffee. It's good coffee, and available free now in CentOS.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

      "Seriously, what's the point of this project?"

      Supporting hosts other than Linux? Such as FreeBSD or NetBSD, which make much leaner and more efficient hosts than Linux.

      1. HieronymusBloggs

        Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

        "FreeBSD or NetBSD, which make much leaner and more efficient hosts than Linux"

        Is this actually true? I run Debian and OpenBSD, and the two base systems aren't vastly different in size. Admittedly OpenBSD base includes web and mail servers, but those are quite small. There are other possible reasons for choosing *BSD over Linux of course.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

          "I run Debian and OpenBSD"

          I left out OpenBSD in my comment since it's not very performant compared to Net and Free, which have had a lot more focus on performance. The size of the system isn't a great indicator of performance - it's down to the specifics of the implementation. For example, the GNU userland has tended to be quite memory hungry compared to the BSD ones simply because the official GNU coding style favoured lots of dynamic memory allocation over fixed sized data structures or buffers.

          1. HieronymusBloggs

            Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

            "GNU userland has tended to be quite memory hungry compared to the BSD ones"

            Good point, and one I overlooked when I made my previous comment.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

      Well, you are right, the hardware list is limited. That is largely irrelevant to smaller users, since it works, and works very well on hardware that is not on the list, and never was. There are many small/home labs running XenServer, since you got a lot of features for nothing.

      The point is not to resurrect the API, but to provide a full-featured platform that does not have the newly imposed restrictions that have landed courtesy of Citrix. The platform was good before that, and hopefully this incarnation will be again.

      If the coffee is CentOS, that would be why the starting point is CentOS.

      One could equally ask "Why use KVM and oVirt?"

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

        “One could equally ask "Why use KVM and oVirt””

        Well... off the top of my head how about: “it exists now and you can get patches for Meltdown and Specter without paying for an enterprise license”

        Also I don’t think that they are thinking about BSD support (doesn’t BSD have hypervisor software already?)

        1. hack3rcon

          Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

          He/She is against Xen and Citrix XenServer because He/She doesn't know how to configure them. I bet He/She doesn't know that KVM without oVirt is hard to configure and...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

            “He/She is against Xen and Citrix XenServer because He/She doesn't know how to configure them. I bet He/She doesn't know that KVM without oVirt is hard to configure and...”

            Are you a Citrix Sales Technician? I only ask because this is roughly the same level of argument I was given when I said that we were looking at moving to View...

            1. hack3rcon

              Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

              No, I'm not, But I guess you are a Redhat Sales Technician that want to ads KVM here and write bad words against Xen and XenServer.

    3. hack3rcon

      Re: Why not just use KVM and oVirt?

      Because we have brain and use XenServer.

  2. hack3rcon

    Citrix XenServer performance is great.

    I have a background about other products like VMWare ESXi and when I tested Citrix XenServer then I must tell you that it is awesome. The performance is great and many features are free and easy to use.

    Thank you Citrix and Xen Project community.

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