Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM
-
Amazon, long the champion of the Xen hypervisor on which they built their empire and the entire concept of cloud computing, has now decided that the time has come to join the ranks of Vultr and Digital Ocean in moving to KVM as their new hypervisor, according to the Register.
One of the reasons for the move - Amazon AWS is moving to custom Intel-made processors and they are customizing their KVM hypervisor to take advantage of the unique processors which they will be using.
-
This is enormous news. This, more than anything, signals the end of the road for Xen. A very sad day.
-
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
-
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
It is, but it is much harder. Xen is more complex in that way. And I'm sure a big piece is that they had to make a decision now as to if they should customize Xen or KVM. So if they were thinking that the time was coming to make the switch, this would be what triggered it to be "now" rather than "soon."
-
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
It is, but it is much harder. Xen is more complex in that way. And I'm sure a big piece is that they had to make a decision now as to if they should customize Xen or KVM. So if they were thinking that the time was coming to make the switch, this would be what triggered it to be "now" rather than "soon."
Besides para-virtualization, what other reasons to stick with Xen at all? APIs for Xen? Just in case a job require the need for Xen?
-
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
It is, but it is much harder. Xen is more complex in that way. And I'm sure a big piece is that they had to make a decision now as to if they should customize Xen or KVM. So if they were thinking that the time was coming to make the switch, this would be what triggered it to be "now" rather than "soon."
Besides para-virtualization, what other reasons to stick with Xen at all? APIs for Xen? Just in case a job require the need for Xen?
PV tech is the big piece. Other than that, Xen has fallen behind KVM, mostly due to most resources being focused on KVM for a long time now.
-
Maybe it's the biggest new of the year for the whole industry.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
It is, but it is much harder. Xen is more complex in that way. And I'm sure a big piece is that they had to make a decision now as to if they should customize Xen or KVM. So if they were thinking that the time was coming to make the switch, this would be what triggered it to be "now" rather than "soon."
Besides para-virtualization, what other reasons to stick with Xen at all? APIs for Xen? Just in case a job require the need for Xen?
PV tech is the big piece. Other than that, Xen has fallen behind KVM, mostly due to most resources being focused on KVM for a long time now.
Xen's biggest strength was it's API's but performance wise it was getting slaughtered by modern KVM and ESXi on throughput. I saw benchmark testing done by some large ISP for NFV projects and it was brutal. The DOM0 design had some serious bottlenecks, and Xen's PV tech was largely obsoleted by other CPU offload functions. KVM's API's are maturing to the point that it's time for everyone to move on for people looking for an open source platform.
-
@francesco-provino said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Maybe it's the biggest new of the year for the whole industry.
Could easily be.
-
@storageninja said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@black3dynamite said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Why is it not possible to customize Xen to work with the custom Intel-made processing?
It is, but it is much harder. Xen is more complex in that way. And I'm sure a big piece is that they had to make a decision now as to if they should customize Xen or KVM. So if they were thinking that the time was coming to make the switch, this would be what triggered it to be "now" rather than "soon."
Besides para-virtualization, what other reasons to stick with Xen at all? APIs for Xen? Just in case a job require the need for Xen?
PV tech is the big piece. Other than that, Xen has fallen behind KVM, mostly due to most resources being focused on KVM for a long time now.
Xen's biggest strength was it's API's but performance wise it was getting slaughtered by modern KVM and ESXi on throughput. I saw benchmark testing done by some large ISP for NFV projects and it was brutal. The DOM0 design had some serious bottlenecks, and Xen's PV tech was largely obsoleted by other CPU offload functions. KVM's API's are maturing to the point that it's time for everyone to move on for people looking for an open source platform.
They had / have some new PV tech coming down the pike, but too little, too late sadly.
-
It's sad to see Xen go for historical reasons. But logically, the field has too many players. Consolidation is needed. Xen and KVM are already both from the Linux Foundation and XenServer has just driven Xen into the ground. It's horrible that so much went into Xen and now it is being lost, but the better thing for everyone would be for the Xen team to be folded into the KVM team and just focus on a single thing going forward.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
It's sad to see Xen go for historical reasons. But logically, the field has too many players. Consolidation is needed. Xen and KVM are already both from the Linux Foundation and XenServer has just driven Xen into the ground. It's horrible that so much went into Xen and now it is being lost, but the better thing for everyone would be for the Xen team to be folded into the KVM team and just focus on a single thing going forward.
Linus never was a fan of Xen I've heard (KVM got it's bits into the kernel first, while there was some snobbery about the quality of Xen's commits).
-
@storageninja said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
It's sad to see Xen go for historical reasons. But logically, the field has too many players. Consolidation is needed. Xen and KVM are already both from the Linux Foundation and XenServer has just driven Xen into the ground. It's horrible that so much went into Xen and now it is being lost, but the better thing for everyone would be for the Xen team to be folded into the KVM team and just focus on a single thing going forward.
Linus never was a fan of Xen I've heard (KVM got it's bits into the kernel first, while there was some snobbery about the quality of Xen's commits).
Well Xen actually came first in the kernel. but of course Linux preferred a Linux solution over a non-Linux solution. That's not really a fair way to gauge things. KVM is Linux virtualization, Xen is not.
-
@scottalanmiller The first way I ran Xen was on BSD and Solaris actually.
-
@storageninja said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller The first way I ran Xen was on BSD and Solaris actually.
Yup, NetBSD was popular with Xen once upon a time. Solaris was pretty niche.
-
Wow, that's big news. Looks like it's a good time to convert my home environment to KVM. Currently, I'm on Xen and was looking to try out KVM anyway. Seems like a good time.
-
@fuznutz04 said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Wow, that's big news. Looks like it's a good time to convert my home environment to KVM. Currently, I'm on Xen and was looking to try out KVM anyway. Seems like a good time.
Yeah, and with XenServer being so bad now, so much of the SMB use case of Xen just doesn't make sense there any more either.
-
Having used both Xen and KVM, I gotta say that I find KVM to be much easier to work with.
-
@dafyre said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Having used both Xen and KVM, I gotta say that I find KVM to be much easier to work with.
I've found them both really easy
-
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@dafyre said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
Having used both Xen and KVM, I gotta say that I find KVM to be much easier to work with.
I've found them both really easy
XenServer was easy, but just didn't mesh well with how I wanted it to work. KVM was a bit easier to get set up in my remote environment.
