CloudAccess.net is the official host of demo.joomla.org and one of the countless cloud-based companies that benefits from Xen technologies. Thousands of users launch free trials of the Joomla CMS through the company’s  platform every month and the Xen Hypervisor is at the center of it all. It’s the critical component that provisions compute and allows for Joomla application virtualization.

When the Xen Project needed a new, more collaborative home on the web, project leaders ultimately decided to build using Joomla. Lars Kurth, Community Manager, said that,  “in a nutshell, the Joomla back-end is a lot easier to use and to get started with than Drupal. That makes it ideal for a community site where you want volunteers to be able to do contribute.” Lars also added that “Joomla is relatively intuitive when you need to figure out how to get stuff done.”

Mark Hinkle said that “CloudAccess.net is in the unique position of having a strong hosting presence combined with an intimate knowledge of the Joomla! CMS + Application Framework, developer ecosystem and the Joomla! open source community.” He further commented that “we chose CloudAccess.net for numerous projects because of their broad knowledge and their dedication to supporting the underlying open source community as well as their skill at developing interactive websites that foster participation from the users of those sites.”

CloudAccess.net CEO Gary Brooks commented that “we were very excited to work with Xen on this project. We obviously share similar open source values and we both contribute to open source collaborative communities. Without Xen, our company wouldn’t exist. We’re defining what we think ‘cloud’ means, and Xen produces the technologies that drive our highly available, scalable applications. We are the prime example of what’s possible with Xen, a poster child of sorts.”

About the author: Ryan Bernstein is the Chief Operating Officer at CloudAccess.net and an adjunct professor of composition and public speaking at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, Michigan.

• For vote: Xen Project Governance v2
• For vote: Mailing List Conventions v1
• For review: Xen Security Problem Response Process v2
• For vote: Dates and Locations for 2014 Events

Note that changes to governance documents are marked in the following way:

• minor changes are marked in orange italics
• additions are marked in orange italics
• major deletions are striked through

Governance Proposals for Vote

The following two proposals are up for vote using this voting form. As the two proposals affect all Xen Project teams, all committers, maintainers and project leads of Mature projects and the community manager can vote. The vote will be open until May 20, 2013.

Xen Project Governance v2

The Xen Project Governance v2 has been out for community review since April 30th. It is now time to vote using the voting form above.

Mailing List Conventions v1

On April 14th, we started a discussion on naming list conventions, which then became a proposal for Mailing List Conventions. There seems to be no controversy, thus it is time to vote using the voting form above.

Governance Proposals for Review

Xen Security Problem Response Process v2

In the last update on the security problem response process, we promised a vote in mid-January. Near the end of the window, some changes were proposed, and we were somewhat sidetracked with launching Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

As this process impacts many Xen users, we feel that it is prudent to run through a final week of community review (closing on Monday May 20th), followed by a formal vote by maintainers, committers and the project lead of the Hypervisor project a week later. Review comments are to be posted in response to this thread. The proposal can be found here.

For Vote: Dates and Locations for 2014 Events

As it is very hard to book event space on short notice, I wanted to ask you all where to hold Xen Project user and developer events in 2014. Earlier this year, there was a debate whether we should rotate Xen Events around the globe. The answer was a very strong yes. As we have a Hackathon and Xen Developer Summit in Europe this year, Europe will not be an option for a developer event in 2014.

Rather than creating a voting form, I decided to use the voting feature on the new Xen Project website. To vote, you need to create an account. If you have difficulties, let me know. The poll is here. The vote will stay open until the middle of June. Anybody in the community can vote.

There is an answer – but it varies depending on the audience.

For the business person, the answer is that Xen is a safe, stable, well-tested choice for virtualization which is used by industry giants (Amazon, Rackspace, Verizon, etc.).  It has a robust consortium of companies behind its development and it has the price, performance, and security to go toe-to-toe with the best offerings in the industry.  Plus, it has a proven 10-year track record which includes powering some of the largest clouds in the world.

For tech-savvy users of F/OSS, however, there are additional considerations.  A few of these include:

• Type 1 Hypervisor: The fact that the Xen Project employs a Type 1 Hypervisor – a hypervisor which runs on bare metal rather than within an existing operating system kernel  – means its architecture has special attributes when it comes to scale, security, and performance.
• Disaggregation: The ability to segment individual device drivers into small, nimble Driver Domains means that device-related performance bottlenecks can be reduced or eliminated.  It also means that device drivers which might be subject to attack by crackers can be segmented from the rest of the environment and even refreshed regularly to remove any compromise which may be incurred.  Similarly, an unstable device driver can be isolated via disaggregation and easily rebooted if it should fail.
• Flexible Virtualization Modes: The hypervisor provides different virtualization modes which allow the administrator to adapt to the specifics in the workload and capabilities of the hardware.  In particular, Xen pioneered the now popular concept of a paravirtualization (PV) mode offering an extremely optimized low-overhead experience for many workloads.
• Multiple Architectures: The software can run on traditional x86 32-bit and 64-bit hardware (both with and without virtual extensions in the hardware), as well as on the new breed of ARM-based servers.  As your datacenter moves forward, your virtualization solution is prepared to move ahead with you.
• Tool-Agnostic Cloud: The Xen Project was born with the concept that virtualization should be controllable in the manner which later came to be called Cloud Computing.  The availability of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and its associated programming interface (XAPI) ensure that you can control your VMs the way you want to, using whatever tool stack you choose.  Cloud technologies such as CloudStack and OpenStack can easily manipulate Xen VMs.  There is no such thing as vendor (or project) lock-in to any one cloud solution.
• Open Source: The Xen Project is now a Collaborative Project of the Linux Foundation, ensuring that the destiny of the project remains squarely with the community.  Yet, the impressive array of commercial project members ensures that substantial resources are martialed for the continued development of Xen.
• Moving Forward: The Xen Project continues breaking new ground with incubation projects like Mirage OS, which will produce certain tiny, highly efficient VMs utilizing exokernel technology.

Clearly, there are lots of reasons to use Xen.  Maybe the better question is, “Why not use Xen?”

This article was originally published in Linux.com on 06-May-2013.  The original article can be read here.

A tarball has been made available for ease and speed-up testing: Xen 4.3.0 RC1 Tarball (and signature).

For more detailed instructions on how to effectively test this first release candidate, look at this Wiki page: Xen 4.3 RC1 Test Instructions.

And like if this wasn’t enough, today (Wednesday, 8th May 2013) is the first Xen Test Day for Xen 4.3, so come on #xentest (on freenode) and help us nailing nasty bugs! Further Xen Test Days are scheduled for May 22nd and June 4th.

In this session Mike is going to cover the challenges and how CentOS + Xen fits into the role with a product / infrastructure standpoint. Starting with roots of how GoDaddy got started with XenServer and then how they were able to leverage the open source Xen stack on CentOS moving forward to their next-gen cloud.

Mike has been a key person involved with this project and brings across a well rounded, comprehensive and tested viewpoint on the subject. What to hear his talk ? Register now for the CentOS Dojo.

The CentOS Dojo format promotes informal sessions, focused around real world challenges that people using CentOS in established roles face. This includes technologies, concepts, best-practices and q&a around the CentOS Linux platform. These Dojos are run as not-for-profit, with all ticket sales revenue being cycled into costs at the event.

We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to announce the release of the Xen 4.1.5 and 4.2.2 maintenance releases. These are immediately available from their respective Git repositories and from the Xen Project download pages

• Xen 4.1.5 Download page
• Xen 4.2.2 Download page

Both maintenance releases contain fixes for critical security vulnerabilities and many bug fixes and improvements (about 50 in Xen 4.1.5 and 100 in Xen 4.2.2). For more details check the Xen Project download pages. Xen releases are source releases: you can find build instructions on the Xen Project Wiki. Linux and BSD distros tend to supply updated versions of Xen with a delay based on their release cycle.

The next Xen Document Day is on Monday April 29th

Also just a quick reminder that next Monday is a Xen Document Day. Document Days are for people who care about Xen Documentation and want to improve it. Everybody who can and wants contribute is welcome to join! For a list of items that need work, check out the community maintained TODO and wishlist. We also have a few beginners items in the list. Of course, you can work on anything you like: the list just provides suggestions.

See you on IRC : #xendocs @ freenode !

Xen 4.3 Test Days

You may have seen that Xen 4.3 is now in code freeze and that we are starting to produce release candidates. Last year, we trialled Xen Test Days and felt this is a good way to harness user feedback in a more organized and fun way. For more information see Xen Test Days on the Wiki for more information. The planned dates for the Xen 4.3 Test Days are:

• May 8th, 2013
• May 22nd, 2013
• June 5th, 2013

See you on IRC : #xentest @ freenode !

Xen Project Events Pages

Note that I will be publishing Xen Document and Test Days – alongside other events – on the Xen Project Event Pages. It is also possible to use the web interface of xenproject.org, to add events to your calendar. Also, community members can add their own events: for example if you speak about Xen at an event, why not just add yourself?

As a reminder, we are planning on a 9-month release cycle. Based on that, below are
our estimated dates:

• Feature freeze: 25 March 2013
• Code freezing point: 15 April 2013< == We are here
• First RC: 6 May 2013
• Release: 17 June 2013

If you are an early adopter, please begin testing functionality that you care about and reporting bugs!

• For trademark reasons all xen.org sites will be migrated to the xenproject.org domain in the coming weeks. This will require care and be executed over a period of several weeks. At the moment, xenproject.org and xen.org are aliased.
• Each site such as the wiki, blog, mailing lists, code repos, etc. will get a new header that includes a global navigation bar. In some cases we will create a skin or theme that matches the overall look and feel of the new Xen Project site. However, we felt it was to risky to make too many changes at once.
• We have a new Xen Project community website at xenproject.org, with most of the content of the old site migrated and exciting new functionality. Normally we would have developed this site in collaboration with the community, but it was already clear a few months ago that we would launch the new website in sync with moving to the Linux Foundation and content on the new site would have been a give-away of what was going to come. As you had no chance to give feedback, we are treating the new site as a beta.

• However, the plan is to archive the old Xen Project website very quickly.

Noteworthy Featuers of the New Xen Project Website

I wanted to highlight a number of new features in the new website that are worth highlighting.

• User Profiles: The new site is much more interactive than the old site and allows users to register and interact with each other much more than was possible in the old site.
• Q&A system: You will find a stackoverflow like Question and Answer system under Help > Questions and Answers. It is pretty self explanatory, but I attached a screenshot with some notes. We have question categories for New Users, each Xen team/sub-project (e.g. PVOPS, Hypervisor, ARM Hypervisor, XAPI, Mirage OS, …) and for website questions under Website Issues and Questions.
• Ecosystem Pages: We added a self-service eco-system page for community members, companies and projects. The intention is that anybody who registers on the website can add an entry to the ecosystem directory. Additions of and modification of each new entry will be moderated. The new pages are the equivalent of the Ecosystem pages on the old website. The main difference is that the community will be able to maintain their own entries rather than depending on us. We will not migrate existing content, as this would mean that we – the Xen Project Community team – would own entries. However, we really want community members, companies and projects to own and maintain their own directory entries.
• Job Postings: The new site will have the capability to add job postings in the Xen community. Again these will be moderated.
• Towards a true community site: The CMS underlying the new site will enable us to eventually open up parts of the site to community members and allow them to maintain their own portion of the site. For example the pages that relate to the Xen Hypervisor project should be editable by the project lead, the committers and people they invite to help maintain those pages.

I would like to encourage you all to create a user profile on xenproject.org and provide feedback or ask other questions you may have regarding the new site via the Q&A system (please use the Website Issues and Questions category).

Social Media: Twitter, Facebook and Google+ Pages

We have rebranded some of the social media accounts for Xen.org already. In most cases we registered URLs for channels, groups and twitter IDs to allow us to move to from xen or xen_org to xenproject at some point in the future.  For twitter in particular, we are asking people to start using the #xenproject instead of the #xen hashtag. The #xen hashtag has been a personal bug-bear of mine for some time as #xen is used for anything from watches, suntan lotion, nightclubs, … you name it. Using #xenproject should allow us as a community to uniquely identify posts related to the project.

We also have two new community pages: a Facebook page and a Google+ page. First of all I would want to invite you to like or follow the pages. Also, these are intended to be community pages with content, pictures, posts, etc. provided by members of our community. I will initially open these to developers, see how it goes and expand later.

An increase in Diversity

Let’s have a quick recap of Xen Governance Evolution: in early 2011, the developer community largely operated through a set of unwritten rules. This made it hard to join the community. In retrospect this had actually stopped vendors from contributing and was the reason why some early contributors abandoned Xen. Since then, we defined our governance model formalizing values, roles, decision making, the project life-cycle and other areas. Ownership and responsibilities of tasks have been distributed to community members. We also created a forum for distinguished community members (individuals as well as vendors contributing to the project) through the Xen Maintainer, Committer and Developer Meetings, which have evolved into a Project Management Committee (even though we don’t call it a PMC). Also, we have a better approach to planning and generating a Xen Roadmap, a well-defined Security Vulnerability Process and other community initiatives. The effect all this had is that the contributor community grew from 6 organizations contributing more than 1% to the code in 2010 to 13 organizations in 2012. The next logical step for Xen was to become a truly independent open source project, and this has now happened.

Bringing Users and Developers Together

One thing I am really pleased with is the diverse list of companies that joined the Xen Advisory Board to support the project financially.

• Hardware and Silicon vendors such as AMD, Calxeda, Cisco, Intel and Samsung.
• Companies that use Xen in software products such as Bromium, Citrix and Oracle.
• Large scale users of Xen, such as Amazon, CA, Google and Verizon Terremark.

This is a good and healthy mix. Because of Xen’s roots as a University project, it was an almost exclusively developer-focused community. Some even complained that the project didn’t care a lot about its users. But for open source projects to succeed, tending and growing your user base is essential. In the last two years, the community started a program of change and has engaged its user base much more. Having good user representation on the Xen Advisory Board should help foster and accelerate this change. The icing on the cake is the new xenproject.org site (which we are launching as beta today) is designed to be a site for the entire community: bringing users, developers as well as companies together.

More Collaboration

For the Xen 4.3 release we have already seen an increased amount of collaboration and up-front planning on issues such as performance and scalability improvements, new features such as PVH and Xen ARM support for ARM based servers, UEFI secure boot, working with upstream projects such as Linux and QEMU, downstream Linux and BSD distros and cloud orchestration stacks. Embedding Xen into the Linux family as a Linux Foundation Collaborative project should lead to more such collaboration as part of the wider Linux and open source community. Of course this will not happen by itself: one of my personal priorities for the rest of this year is that more collaboration happens.

What is going to change?

If you are a Xen User or Developer pretty much nothing initially. Everything will continue to run as it always has. In the longer run, I am confident that the Xen Collaborative Project will lead to more code contributions, better integration with Linux distributions, increased adoption of Xen, more integration with other projects, better marketing and a lot more. All the changes should be positive.

There will be some short-term changes though that will affect you: xen.org will move to xenproject.org, the Xen Logo is changing and we have a new Xen Community website at xenproject.org (which means the old site will be archived). More information can be found at this FAQ.

The event was very interesting, lots of talks specially oriented at system administrators, so the Xen.org team didn’t want to miss this great opportunity to speak about Xen, especially considering that, not long ago, the first packages of Xen for CentOS 6 were announced at FOSDEM. More info about the event can be found at the CentOS Dojo wiki page.