Re: [Xen-devel] New feature support - xl or xm ?

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Vincent, Pradeep wrote:
> I haven’t looked deeply into ‘xl’ but..
> 
> >From the recent Xen summit, I walked away thinking ‘xl’ didn’t have the 
> >callback mechanisms (e.g. Cleanup etc) and this
> helped it stay stateless while falling short of full ‘xm’ replacement. This 
> email thread indicates ‘xm/xend’ will be
> deprecated in due course of time. Did I miss anything here ?
> 

We intend to port xend to libxl at some point to smooth the migration
path, however xl is going to be where most of the development and
testing is going on, so it is worth considering a switch to xl in any
case.
xl does have the callback mechanisms for cleanup, they are implemented
in a per-VM daemon that is started when you create the domain.
However you can still create a VM without starting the related daemon
(no callbacks or cleanups in that case).


> Is migration of VMs from ‘xm’ managed hosts to ‘xl’ managed hosts expected to 
> work ?
> 
> I think moving away from commonly used xend/xm could be a bit of a thorn 
> particularly if the ‘xm’ to ‘xl’ migration isn’t
> expected to work.
> 
> Thoughts ?
>

There are only two things that xl doesn't have compared to xend: the
concept of managed domains (domains that are installed on your system
and may be offline) and an XML-RPC interface.
If you don't need these two things than switching shouldn't be
difficult.
I think that migrating VMs from 'xm hosts' to 'xl hosts' would
work even at the moment, if you use xl on both source and destination
hosts and specify the configuration file you used to create the domain
at the source. In any case it could be made to work without too many
efforts, given that your are not speaking about fully managed domains.

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel