XCP-ng Blog

For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support:

- xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.

- proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available.

- The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]

[1] - https://xcp-ng.com/

[2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware

[3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve

[4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Virtual-to-Virtual_.28V2V.29

[5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support

[6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/

[7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware

A quick test-run on the pages linked from the hackernews front page:

hackernews svg logo doesn't render

youtube embed on the servo homepage doesn't load

https://github.com/tpope/timl -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core

https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/the-obvious-final-step/ -> hangs while loading the page, uses 100% of 1 core

https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/ -> loads/renders fine

https://github.com/reactos/reactos -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefinitely-postponed/ -> loads fine but css rendering/placement is off on breadcrumbs and article

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2023/05/23/new-xen-updates-on-risc-v/ -> very long load then hangs while loading javascript/content.

Not a great batting average - seems like sites need to be purpose built for this or leverage little/no modern javascript libraries for it to render accurately. Servo has been in this state for the last 5 or 6 years since I first discovered it.

I recommend everyone using XenServer to move to XCP-ng [0]. They take the XenServer sources, remove licensing restrictions and add some great new features etc (like nfs4.1, ZFS etc.). They're from the same people behind Xen Orchestra (web-based console for XenServer) [1], and offer pro support like Citrix [2].

I was about to move off XenServer with the recent changes to licensing [3] (tl;dr they removed a bunch of features from the free edition), but XCP-ng has allowed me to continue with XenServer whilst make few changes to my already-working setup.

[0] https://xcp-ng.org/

[1] https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-home

[2] https://xcp-ng.com/

[3] https://xenserver.org/blog/entry/xenserver-7-3-changes-to-the-free-edition.html

A lot of the world has moved on from virtualbox to primarily qemu+kvm and to some extent xen. Usually with some higher-level tool on top. Some of these are packages you can run on your existing OS and some are distributions with hypervisor for people who use VMs as part of their primary workflows. If you just want quick-and-easy one-off Windows VM and move on, check out quickemu.

Libvirt and virt-manager https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Libvirt

Quickemu https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Proxmox VE https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve

QubesOS https://qubes-os.org

Whonix https://whonix.org

XCP-ng https://xcp-ng.org/

You can also get some level of isolation by containers (lxc, docker, podman).

Xen provides a great security design and a protocol to do hypercall that makes sense (unlike kvm+virtio which is DMA all the way, with all the plus in terms of simplicity but the bad on the isolation aspects).

If I wanted to caricature the situation: KVM is more simple to work with in terms of dev (you have results fast), but kind of "fuck security".

Xen is hard from the dev perspective, because it's a more micro kernel by itself, and you can't cheat to have access to the memory, you have to use grant tables (see https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/07/27/grant-table-in-xen/ ).

So if a part of the industry took a shortcut, doesn't mean Xen isn't still relevant :)

Bit of a surprising comment - Xen is very widely used - even all of AWS is Xen (I believe), are you perhaps thinking of XenServer (Citrix's OS / Distro based on Xen)?

If you do mean XenServer, well - yes some large places are still using it but it's definitely dying out after they proved very slow to deliver new features then put a restriction on free / open source users as of 7.3 onwards that prevents clusters great that 3 hosts rendering mostly useless.

XCP-ng (https://xcp-ng.org/) is a fork of XenServer which is picked up where XenServer left off and is doing a lot in a short period of time (IMO) to add new features and build / support the community.