Citrix has recently joined the Linux Foundation, and there is a report (which they seem to have endorsed) that they plan to open source XenServer. That’s not Xen, it’s XenServer – not the kernel, the product, the thing you stick on your server instead of ESXi, or sometimes vSphere.
It is entirely possible that Citrix’s lawyers have noticed that XenServer was so infected with GPL code that it was already Open Source anyway.
There’s been a lot of press around the FREE Ubuntu 9.10 Linux distribution as a client operating system, and a wide set of comparisons made (typically by Mac or PC-using journalists) between Ubuntu and Windows 7, but 9.10 is also interesting from a broader virtualization and especially Cloud perspective. Ubuntu is managed by a UK company, Canonical, through a bona-fide foundation. Ubuntu will always be free, and is aligned with the Debian community.
Microsoft and Red Hat Cross-Certify to try and get VmWare out of the Datacenter. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 has passed certification tests when running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.
Windows Server 2003/ Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 R2 are validated to run on RHEL 5.4, using the KVM-based hypervisor.
Eucalyptus is a software stack that when added to a standard virtualized data-center or co-located server network, turns it into a Cloud which looks exactly like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is a “self-build” Amazon Cloud kit. Just add hypervisor.
We consider Eucalyptus in the context of cloud to datacenter migrations, and standards for cloud APIs.
In trying to re-use some old server hardware I re-vsisted VirtualBox/Ubuntu, a viable and completely free Open Source option for non-virtualization-enabled hardware. It is a neat solution, simple and well-supported, but the open source version of VirtualBox is nobbled to make it extremely awkward to use, in a different way to VMware’s nobbling of the non-Open Source (but also free) ESXi.
Now is the time, for Oracle/Sun to put all the features of VirtualBox into the Open Source version, and let it live on, perhaps not for use on Linux servers, but as free virtualization platform for other operating systems on Windows. If Apple ever loosens up the licencing on MacOS, it could turn 15 million PCs into Macs – overnight.
When VMware acquired SpringSource it also gained an OSGi runtime known as SpringSource dm Server, to which developers can directly build applications using the Spring and other development toolsets without the use of a J2EE application Server such as WebSphere or Tomcat (which is integrated into SpringSource dm Server for backwards compatibility. It is not entirely fanciful that the OSGi Runtime could, in due course, be made to run directly on the hypervisor, removing the requirement for a Guest O/S, leaving a complete VMware Enterprise Java stack.
