The XCP team would like to formally announce Project Kronos, our port of XCP’s XenAPI toolstack to Debian and Ubuntu dom0. This will give users the ability to install Debian or Ubuntu, and then just do ‘apt-get install xapi’ in order to build a system that is (roughly) functionally equivalent to a standard XCP distribution.
This project provides a number of benefits. First of all, it will provide Xen users with the option of using the same API and toolstack that XCP and XenServer provide. It will give early adopters the chance to try out new changes to the XenAPI before they get released in new XCP and XenServer versions. And because we’ve ported all of our toolstack to build on Debian, it’s now much, much easier to build our tools outside of an SDK VM.
Some useful links:
- Our general roadmap for this project (and XCP in general) can be found here: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XCP_Roadmap
- Instructions for installing the XenAPI toolstack on Debian can be found here: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XAPI_on_debian
- A list of project milestones, deliverables for each milestone, and individual work items for the project can be found on this Google Docs spreadsheet.
- For building the toolstack from source, Jon Ludlam has an autobuilder repository on github here: https://github.com/jonludlam/xapi-autobuilder
To use the xapi autobuilder, just clone the repository and type ‘make’. This will pull in all the dependency repositories and build them using pbuilder. If you want to build individual packages, dig into the build scripts a bit to see what’s going on — hopefully we’ll have a little better documentation soon.
Please follow the instructions and play along! This is very much a work in progress, and things are expected to change rapidly. We don’t expect everything to work properly yet, but we think it’s ready enough to at least share our progress. If you do decide to test this out, please report any bugs you find or problems you encounter to the xen-api mailing list, with the subject line “Xapi on Debian: <blah>”. There are also XCP contributors lurking on #xen-api on freenode who may be able to answer questions about build or install problems.
Thanks to everyone who’s helped out with this project, and to everyone who is about to give it a try. Happy hacking!
I would like AMD64 packages links.
And a PPA for Ubuntu where not only install from, update too.
I am an advanced domestic user, and i want to test the dirct acces to GPU installing MS WOS 7 in XEN on my dayly Ubuntu system.
I think that if it does work fine it would be a good default isntallation of MS WOS 7 for avoiding virus problems for SOHO – even they wil not use Linux , but their administrators -normally small hardware vendors – would be able to assist them better remotely.
I do know it is the main goal of XEN, but it can be important for SOHO vendors giving them a good value add.
Thanks in advance for all your work
@mitcoes: For a few very technical reasons that I won’t get into here, XCP and XenServer have used 32-bit systems as the dom0 host OS. This is mainly for performance reasons. We are looking to build 64-bit packages, but this configuration has never been tested and will definitely be experimental.
The idea is that the Ubuntu PPAs will be constantly updated. We will likely have both a stable and unstable repo.
Regarding your comment about virtualizing Windows 7 using Xen: Citrix have based much of their business around providing virtualized Windows desktops through their XenDesktop software, so yes, this is definitely a core use-case for Xen.
Awesome! I am so excited to try this out! This will save me a fortune in KVM-over-IP costs since I’m not fortunate to have my own data centre
Please keep up the good work – this is a great step in the right direction.
p.s. Will these xapi packages work with Xen 4+, Remus etc ?
Actually, the Kronos xapi packages require Xen 4.1.
Remus is integrated into Xen 4.1, so the functionality would be present, but xapi has no mechanism for controlling it. I would imagine that activating Remus underneath xapi would really confuse xapi and probably leave your system in an unstable state.
There has been some talk on the xen-api mailing list about adding Remus support to xapi, bu there are no concrete plans yet.
Just to reiterate what I posted elsewhere…
I would much prefer that “a ‘yum install xapi’ on Fedora” be developed first.
I’ve run into MANY problems in trying to get Xen working properly using Ubuntu 11.10 as Dom0. In contrast, Xen works pretty much out-of-the box with Fedora 16. So with this in mind, and given the relationship between Fedora and RHEL, I’m not sure why you guys didn’t focus on “Xapi for Fedora” first. Seems like that would have been an easier and quicker route to getting a product out to users. Is it too late to target “Xapi for Fedora” as your first priority for now, and then come back to “Xapi for Ubuntu” later, such as when Xen is more stable on Ubuntu? (Of course, if “Xapi for Ubuntu” will be released soon, then that would be great too. I just hope for a working version of EITHER as soon as possible.)
As for other alternatives, I’m currently testing Cloudmin with Fedora 16 on my home server. I wish I could just use the current XCP (or Citrix XenServer), but unfortunately, the current XCP doesn’t have driver support for my Atheros NIC. (CentOS 5.6 also seems to lack out-of-box support for my Atheros NIC, which probably explains why XCP doesn’t support my NIC.)
A bit off topic, but…
I hope that future editions of XCP will be based Fedora instead than CentOS. I mean, what’s the point of offering a repackaged XenServer? Rather than just clone XenServer, XCP should be the cutting edge alternative, much like Fedora is the cutting edge alternative to RHEL.