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Xen and the Art of Virtualization


Microsoft joins industry heavyweights in backing project

By Alex Handy
August 15, 2006 — 
The Xen virtualization platform is fast gaining industry support, thanks to the contributions of companies such as HP, IBM, Novell, Sun and even Microsoft. During the month of July, IBM and HP both announced the introduction of support offerings for Xen running under SUSE, and Microsoft announced that it would begin working with Xen Source, the enterprise software company based on Xen, to foster better compatibility for the virtualization platform.

At the core of the HP and IBM announcements was the release of SUSE Linux 10. Novell’s latest iteration of its Linux-based operating system now includes Xen as a standard part of both server and desktop installations. Since both HP and IBM are offering service and support contracts for their systems that run SUSE, both companies are also offering support for Xen. Interestingly, Microsoft will also be offering support for the tool when it releases Windows Server Longhorn.

But that doesn’t mean that all the companies are seeing eye-to-eye.

IBM, unlike Novell, views Xen as only one piece of a larger virtualization puzzle. Kevin Leahy, director of virtualization strategies at IBM, said that his company sees its role as providing overall management tools that can take care of multiple virtualization environments at once.

Sun, on the other hand, has been working with the Xen team to build up support for running Solaris under the virtualization platform, and HP has been contributing its minds to improving the platform.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that it plans to allow Xen to interoperate with its own hypervisor.

Jim Ni, group product manager of the Windows Server division at Microsoft, said that Longhorn will include a number of features that make virtualization a fundamental part of the operating system. “We’re putting something we call Enlightenment in the core operating system, which allows the OS to understand it’s virtualized. So Linux will run on top of Windows Server Longhorn.”

Ni said that Microsoft’s agreement with Xen Source will help to make Linux run more smoothly on Windows, and to allow Xen environments to transfer seamlessly to the new Windows virtualization platform. Ni also said that Microsoft will modify Windows to make it better able to run under Xen on other operating systems. “Windows does run on third-party virtual machine monitors. It runs on Xen Enterprise, and Microsoft is going to provide commercially reasonable efforts to support premier-level customers,” said Ni, who refused to clarify what “commercially reasonable efforts” means.

Rival Speaks Out
But that agreement isn’t entirely to taste for rival virtualization company VMware. Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s vice president of platform products, claimed that Microsoft is being disingenuous in its statements about the Xen Source agreement.

“This is a one-way arrangement where Microsoft will allow Linux to run on future Microsoft hypervisors through translated calls to the hypervisor when Windows is controlling the hardware, but not the other way around. Under this arrangement, Longhorn Enlightenments will not be ported or licensed to run on a Xen hypervisor,” said Raghuram in a prepared statement. “It is notable that Microsoft’s announcement is being made about a hypervisor whose first release is roughly two years away or more, and while the Linux hypervisor interfaces are still being discussed in the community.”

Raghuram went on to state that Xen is not nearly as mature as his company’s own virtualization platforms, which debuted in 2001.

Raghuram said that VMware’s offerings are able to treat a pool of servers as a singular entity to be provisioned as needed, and that Xen does not yet offer the capabilities needed for large enterprise deployments.


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