| Xen's no killer app |
Dec. 19, 2005
Some folks think that Xen virtualization is going to be the next open-source killer application.
How do I put this gently... No. No, it's not.
Xen is indeed a neat technology. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86. In English, what that means is that with Xen, and a PC with enough processor horsepower and RAM, you can run several operating systems at once.
Older, commercial VM (virtual machine) programs like VMWare support multiple operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Xen, however, which just reached version 3.0, only fully supports the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
Xen will soon be offering support for FreeBSD and NetBSD, but if you want to run Windows and Linux today on the same PC, you're better off with VMWare or Win4Lin.
Now, even just supporting Linux virtual machines is still useful. After all, Xen 3.0 does support up to 32 processors and more than 4GB of memory in 32-bit computing environments. With that you can certainly run enough Apache web servers or Samba file servers to keep a medium sized business happy.
Another difference, though, between a VMWare and Xen, is that for Xen to really do its stuff, it needs to be running on a Linux distribution that's been designed to properly support it. Fortunately, Xen has been really hot in Linux circles and both Red Hat and Novel/SUSE come with Xen-enabled kernels.
To really make Xen useful, though, you also need a way to manage it. Maybe you want to manage, say, 64 Xen virtual instances of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on blade-servers with 32 processors... although I sure don't.
Fortunately, there's a new company XenSource, which includes a lot of the original Xen programmers, that's working on a solution for the management problem. Unfortunately, their administration program, XenOptimizer, isn't out yet.
More to the point, even when XenOptimizer is out, Xen is still not going to be a killer application.
To be a killer app, you need to break new ground, or so overwhelm the competition that you over-run them. Xen, useful as it is and will be, does neither.
Besides VMWare, SWsoft Inc. and Scalent Systems Inc. both already have a tidy business in delivering the VM goods.
Other companies like IBM, which have given its mainframes a new lease on life with Linux virtualization, also have their own house brand VMs, like IBM's Virtualization Engine 2.0.
So, as I look ahead at 2006, I have no trouble at all seeing Xen being an important application. But, a killer application? No, that's just not in the cards.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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