[vox] Want to make some money?

[Alex Mandel]

On 09/28/2010 10:01 PM, Bill Broadley wrote:
> 
> After such a pro-citrix/Xen post I figured I'd post my (admittedly 
> vague) recollection of the Xen history.
> 
> I was an early supporter of Xen.  I started a couple servers on campus 
> and off and was pretty pleased with the result.  Xen related 
> talks/discussions resulted in numerous other departments/organizations 
> using Xen.  At the time it was very straight forward to get the source 
> and patches required for Xen to run on a current linux distro.  Install 
> directions often included a turn key script for downloads of Xen source.
> 
> Then it got harder to find/download, you had to fill out a form, create 
> an account, etc.
> 
> They the supply completely stopped, no new kernel patches/source were 
> released.
> 
> At this time I had 6 or so Dom0/hosts, and wanted to roll out a new 16 
> disk Dom0 and wanted a semi-recent kernel so I could get raid-scrubbing. 
>   This was before Redhat back ported RAID scrubbing which at the time 
> required something newer than 2.6.20.
> 
> Some grad student in Italy was doing some research into virtualization. 
>   He contributed some patches where were picked up by someone who tried 
> to get them to apply to fedora's kernel.  Suse worked from them for 
> awhile, as did ubuntu.  Forums were filled with issues related to them, 
> death under heavy network loads, problems with larger disk arrays, 
> various ugly side effects were pretty well known.  Xen also had numerous 
> ugly warts at the time, stealing the serial driver
> for use with consoles was a particularly painful one for me.  I had to 
> try dozens of kernels to find one that worked with my network, raid 
> controller, and kernel.
> 
> At that point I think it had been over a year since a single line of 
> kernel code came out of Xen.  Various virtualization products were 
> lobbying for mainline kernel changes.  Said community said propose 
> changes that will mean all of your needs and they will be considered. 
> My memory is KVM played nice and got changes submitted, Xen did not and 
> complained rather loudly.
> 
> After *ANOTHER* year of no new patches/kernels from Xen all 3 big linux 
> companies (Redhat, Ubuntu, and SUSE) decide to abandon Xen in favor of 
> KVM.  Oracle decided to stick with Xen but I'll let Oracle's record with 
> open source speak for itself.  Thank god for the ability to fork open 
> source projects.
> 
> The good news is that Xen now seems to be playing nicely with the 
> kernel, contributing patches, and generally working better with the 
> linux community.  I was pretty shocked it took 3 of the biggest linux 
> companies's defections to trigger it.
> 
> So while Citrix has been financially successful and at least for awhile 
> they seemed to be focusing all their efforts on integration and 
> marketing and none on their core technologies.  Sure that's good for 
> stock prices in the short term, but seems like a poor long term plan. 
> Granted they had an early lead in virtualization, which from a technical 
> perspective (IMO) they lost.
> 
> It will be interesting to see what Amazon (which runs on RHEL + Xen 
> today) and various cloud providers (often using KVM) do over the next 
> year.  Especially with RHEL 6 not supporting Xen and Amazon offering 
> Oracle's virtualization (in addition to Xen).
> 
> More recently in 3 different organizations that used to run Xen now run 
> KVM.  Installation is a dream (click virtualization during the install) 
> and I'm a big fan of libvirt and DRBD used with KVM.
> 
> Disclaimer:  I don't own stock or have any financial relation with any 
> of the above mentioned companies.


A side note, as far as I know Citrix products are not supported on the
desktop. So while they will help you setup VPN, virtual servers,
conferencing etc - that does not apply to linux clients..I'm not sure
they support Mac at all either.

Kind of an odd stance considering their product lineup, but I'm not sure
they tell end users that they use linux. I'd be happy if this
information is proven wrong.

Alex