My day job just got open sourced

I haven’t really ever blogged about my work but that all might change beacause this week saw the announcement that one of the best virtualisation and cloud platforms, XenServer has moved to open source. Open source has always been at the heart of the foundations of XenServer and the Xen Hypervisor.

What’s Xen

Xen is one of the leading open-source hypervisor that span out work done in the Cambridge University Computer Lab.

“Wait,”, I hear some ask, “what’s a hypervisor?!”. Well allow me to explain using the analog of operating systems. A program running on your computer needs to be able to access resources. To make it possible to write programs that run anywhere, an operating system will present a process with a consistent and isolated view. A running process knows nothing of other processes. It thinks it is the only thing running with exclusive use of a set of resources. These resources are actually brokered by the OS. For example, a program may ask for a box into which it can put things. The OS will broker the process a box and keep track of where it is. Then the process can just ask for the contents of it’s box and it needn’t know where the box is or anything about any other boxes in use by other processes. In order to broker the resources of the hardware with integrity it needs to be the head-honcho: the one in charge, so it is in control.

Now, let’s take this layer model and add another layer. Suppose I would like to run multiple operating systems on my server. Suddenly we have a problem, who’s going to be in charge? How can any of these guys co-exist with the others and keep track of the state of the machine without this exclusive control of hardware. Well, it would be a real pain in the arse. So we don’t do it that way. We use a similar model to how an OS brokers resources on behalf of processes, completely opaquely. Bring on the hypervisor. The hypervisor is a thin layer of software which is the new head-honcho. It’s the one in exclusive control of the hardware and provides the ability for virtual operating systems (called guests) to execute on one machine. The hypervisor is to operating systems what an operating system is to processes. As such, it presents a virtual machine (termed a domain when running) on which the operating system can run and be the head-honcho it wants to be, in isolation and ignorance of other guests.

Now then, not all guests are creatd equal. One of the guests is more privileged than all the others and has transparent access to the hardware through the hypervisor (cf. the opaque view provided to the other guests). This is called dom0 since it runs in domain 0. This is also sometimes called the control domain since it is used to control and configure the hardware.

That’s probably enough to go on, but for the curious, I suggest you check out the [hypervisor][wikipedia] article on our faviourite online encyclopedia. This is also how I’d explain this to my mother so, for the technical scrutinier, I make no apologies for the deliberate massaging of details with an attempt to not lose too much truth.

The Xen hypervisor has been and will always be open source.

What’s XenServer

XenServer is a server virtualisation and cloud platform which comprises Xen, a custom Dom0 (a modified version of CentOS), a toolstack including the XenAPI and Storage Manager backends.

Historically this has been sold as enterprise software with it’s main use in the server virtualisation market (powering such products as Citrix XenDesktop). Parts of it over the years have been open sourced, most notably the XenAPI, a primarily OCaml codebase.

So, what’s up for grabs?

We’ve gone all-out on this one, so the kitchen sink. Eveything, including the Windows PV drivers, the XenCenter UI and various other packages (see the XenServer Github page).

Who cares?

Well, hopfully, you! You can join the XenServer community over at XenServer.org and see how you can get involved. There’s a whole bunch of guys who are happy to help you get your hands dirty with development:

• The mailing list: xs-devel@lists.xenserver.org;
• The IRC channel: #xen-api on Freenode.

So do me out of a job, learn some OCaml and write some code for the XenServer project.