Xen project Mailing List

2013/7/27 Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxx>

Thomas,

this is a very good question. Sorry for answering late : was travelling. First of all, most of the development of XenServer happens already as part of the Xen Project (in the Xen Hypervisor and XAPI sub-projects) and will continue to be developed there. See http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/25/xenserver-org-and-the-xen-project/

If you look at what Enterprise XenServer is, it is essentially a distribution of Xen, XAPI, CentOS and other open source components. Then there are a number of Windows only components such as XenCenter : for these it would not be appropriate to be part of the Linux Foundation Xen Project.

The Xen Project develops Xen, XAPI and other compenents in a similar fashion to the Linux kernel. Citrix takes these, tests these and adds some extra bits and makes them available as binaries from XenServer.org. But it also allows users of XenServers to purchase support from Citrix: essentially converting a binary downloaded from XenServer.org into a supported commercial variant.

From a Xen Project perspective, allowing Citrix to directly upsell from a deliverable that is hosted in a vendor neutral project (aka Xen Project) is not the right thing to do. This would create an unfair advantage for Citrix in the market place. It would be a bit like arguing that a commercial Linux distro should be part of the Linux kernel. And of course there are likely commercial reasons for Citrix to want to keep XenServer.org separate from the Xen Project.

So the short answer is NO: XenServer is not part of the Xen Project - but most of its parts are.

> Citrix used fedora as underlying os, would an integration mean that the feature set will also be available on debian / different distros?

Citrix used CentOS in the installable ISO variant of xenserver. And there are already XAPI packages (which delivers a XenServer like environment) in Debian and Ubuntu, which is a subset of XenServer. In this blog post http://xenserver.org/blog/entry/making-sense-of-xenserver-vs-xenserver-core-vs-citrix-xenserver.html Citrix describes a model, by which they intend to deliver XenServer meta packages (called "xenserver-core") into suitable Linux distributions that converts a Linux distro into XenServer without being specific. Whether there are concrete plans to support specfic distros, should be asked on xenserver.org.

> thank you for illuminating :)
Hope this answered your question. Feel free to ask for clarification, if I didn't answer it fully. If you ask the same question on xenserver.org, you may also get the Citrix angle

Best Regards
Lars

On 25/07/2013 03:24, Thomas Pöhler wrote:
Hey guys,

i am a bit confused about citrix making their enterprise xenserver completely open source. Will this be included into the xen project? Or do i mix up things here?

Citrix used fedora as underlying os, would an integration mean that the feature set will also be available on debian / different distros?

thank you for illuminating :)

Thomas
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Re: [Xen-users] Integration of Citrix Xenserver into xenproject?