Xen?

[drew einhorn]

Do we know where Red Hat is going with virtualization?

Recent announcements indicate that Xen is being abandoned.

Do we know what will replace Xen?

And what it will take for cobbler to support it?
-- 
Drew Einhorn

[Jeff Schroeder]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 12:24 PM, drew einhorn <drew.einhorn(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  Do we know where Red Hat is going with virtualization?
>
>  Recent announcements indicate that Xen is being abandoned.
>
>  Do we know what will replace Xen? 
kvm dude. Redhat bought qumranet, the company behind kvm. They also
push it in their enterprise offerings and the http://ovirt.org
project.

>  And what it will take for cobbler to support it? 
Cobbler already supports kvm. ovirt uses cobbler to build out new vms fyi.

-- 
Jeff Schroeder

Don't drink and derive, alcohol and analysis don't mix.
http://www.digitalprognosis.com

[Michael DeHaan]

> > And what it will take for cobbler to support it?
> >     
>
>  Cobbler already supports kvm. ovirt uses cobbler to build out new vms fyi.
>
>     
ovirt is actually using libvirt-remote for actual creation of the VMs 
(using cobbler to provide the metadata for the install and to host PXE 
content), something we'll likely also add to cobbler in the near future.

(Namely because the ovirt managed node is very slimmed down and 
originally didn't even have a Python stack.)

Koan does the same equivalent thing though, so you can still install VMs 
using koan if you like.   Plenty of options...

--Michael

[Michael DeHaan]

drew einhorn wrote:
>  Do we know where Red Hat is going with virtualization?
>
>  Recent announcements indicate that Xen is being abandoned.
>     
While I can't speak officially, I'll share what I know.    What is 
happening is that we're going to be spending more time with KVM.   For a 
long time KVM has been in Fedora and has been /excellent/, and KVM is 
much much easier to keep maintained -- where as Xen is not -- because 
it's already in the upstream kernel.  VT capable hardware is also 
becoming much more widespread so we can rely on KVM where before Xen 
paravirt provided a rather important niche -- bringing usable Linux 
virtualization to older machines.
>  Do we know what will replace Xen?
>
>  And what it will take for cobbler to support it?
>     
Cobbler /already/ supports KVM and has had for some time.   Obviously 
libvirt and virt-manager also already support this too.

use --virt-type=qemu in Cobbler (becaue KVM uses the qemu underlying 
bits) instead of --virt-type=xenpv and it will "just work".

If you have the kvm package installed, qemu will nicely accelerate 
itself... though VT capable hardware is, as I mentioned, required, or 
this will use unaccelerated qemu, which you don't want.

For those without VT capable hardware, Xen will remain supported for the 
known future where it is currently supported.   I am not sure what we've 
said about RHEL 6, so I'd urge you to ask your support folks for the 
official answer on that.   Thankfully projects like libvirt are designed 
exactly for this purpose -- so tools like cobbler, virsh, and 
virt-manager are functional regardless of the underlying virtualization 
types.   I think libvirt has been huge in making this possible and 
making sure that virt is manageable regardless of the underlying 
hypervisor.   

You can try this all out today in F10 if you like, and we've announced 
this (KVM) will also be in 5.4.   Again, koan has supported this for a 
very long time, and I've been extremely happy with KVM.

--Michael