Open Source Blog

Not only has Virtual Iron decided to standardize on a specific kernel developed by the Xen community and create open source and commercial variants of its Virtual Iron extensions to that Xen hypervisor (story available free) but XenSource has announced plans for XenEnterprise and Xen Extensions Packs while SWsoft is making its zero downtime migration functionality available via the OpenVZ virtualisation project (both subscription only unfortunately).

For those without subscriptions, here is an outline of the announcements:

With Virtual Iron 3, the company is tossing its own VFe kernel out the window and opting for the Xen tweaks to operating system kernels. Alex Vasilevsky, co-founder and chief technology officer at Virtual Iron, explains that there are actually three Xen-capable kernels of interest, and Virtual Iron is picking only one of them: the Xen hypervisor variant called HVM (short for Hardware Virtual Machine), which was contributed by IBM Research last year and is used primarily to provide a consistent interface to the VT and AVT features in the Intel and AMD processors.

Meanwhile, when Virtual Iron 3 begins shipping later this year, the base product will be called Open Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Community Edition, and will be distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The Community Edition is intended to be used by members of the Xen development community. Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Professional Edition is a compiled version of the stack that is free and that includes support for partitioning and managing a single server. Virtual Iron 3 for Xen/Enterprise Edition is where the company will make money, since this edition will include the closed source Virtualization Manager.

It was only a year ago when the open source Xen hypervisor project took LinuxWorld by storm and XenSource, the company behind it, started making plans to bring commercialised products that rode atop the Xen hypervisor to market in early 2006.

One year on and the company has delivered, with something called XenEnterprise, which is aimed at companies that want to support multiple operating systems, including Windows and perhaps many different Linuxes. None of the operating system providers have any desire to support other platforms in their stacks, so someone has to fill this gap.

XenEnterprise also includes many of the closed-source features that were once part of a planned product called XenOptimizer - such as provisioning and management of virtual machines - that have been rolled into XenEnterprise following customer feedback requests for a single product.

Xen Extensions Packs, meanwhile, sees the Xen hypervisor delivered in conjunction with specific Linux distributions with variations aimed at utility computing, high availability, and other special uses. The Extension Pack approach is recognition that Red Hat customers want Xen integrated and supported through the Red Hat Network and Novell customers want Xen integrated and supported through the YaST Online Update feature of SUSE Linux.

If that wasn't enough, Virtual Private Server software vendor SWsoft has expanded its commitment to the OpenVZ project with the addition of zero downtime migration, which allows a running virtualised environment on one server to be transported on the fly to another server equipped with OpenVZ partitions.

Red Hat's chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, Brian Stevens, recently revealed that the company is interested in the Virtual Private Server or container approach taken by OpenVZ and noted that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has stared to accept container code into the kernel tree that would make it possible. In the meantime, the OpenVZ project will today announce that it has a modified Linux kernel that has been tweaked to support OpenVZ virtual partitions on Red Hat's Fedora Core 5 development release.