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ShareXenSource's XenEnterprise
Posted by Joe Hernick on July 14, 2007
Virtualization will inevitably shrink the bite hardware takes out of our capital budgets. But VMware has somewhat dampened IT's enthusiasm by charging $3,000 per socket for its enterprise-class VMware ESX. Doesn't, say, $750 per perpetual dual-socket license sound a lot better?
At that price, XenSource's XenEnterprise 3.2 is an easy-to-install bargain that takes advantage of the open source Xen 3.04 hypervisor. For many organizations itching to get going with virtualization, XenEnterprise will serve nicely thanks to its solid performance and general ease of use. The current version has some drawbacks: For one, it doesn't yet support 64-bit Windows, but XenEnterprise 4.0 will and it's heading into beta now, with an expected mid-August production date.
Adding to market pressure, Microsoft, another latecomer to the virtual machine party, will include a sufficiently robust virtualization offering as part of its new server operating system. In what has to be good news for XenSource, the big guns in Redmond have preannounced formal support and integration for Xen-based VMs as part of the next server build, to optimize Windows Server 2008 to run on Xen and to let XenVMs run on Server 2008. XenSource is partnering with Microsoft to optimize Win/Xen and Xen/Win performance.
Ain't competition grand?
MAKE THE MOVE
IT groups that plan frequent shuffling of VMs from host to host and need robust snapshot and rollback functionality will want to wait for the 4.0 release of XenEnterprise, which is based on the open source Xen 3.1 hypervisor. But for those who simply need to virtualize non-disk-intensive Linux environments or have a number of infrequently used 32-bit Windows 2003 application servers that occasionally demand high CPU performance, XenSource's XenEnterprise makes sense now.
If you have four, 10, even 15 single-purpose application servers humming away near end of life but have been holding back on virtualization because of license and support costs, you'll want to look at XenEnterprise. It's especially well-suited for shops that run a mix of Linux and Windows on Intel VT- or Advanced Micro Devices V-equipped servers and have in-house Linux talent. We found its hypervisor optimization and paravirtualization tools for Windows impressive.
And XenSource has solid credentials. It was founded by Ian Pratt and the University of Cambridge team that initially developed the open source Xen Project. A raft of venture funding, including the deep pockets of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has let Pratt & Co. commercialize its success while continuing to support the open source initiative.
Speaking of vendor viability, as we reported recently, virtualization is shaping up to be a nightmare for server hardware vendors (see "IDC: Virtualization, Multicore Shake Up Server Market," March 21). Both Gartner and IDC forecast that VM software use could shove the compound annual growth rate for x86 servers into negative territory by 2010.
We agree that the trend to consolidate light-use and "single-box" servers will affect sales, but in the long run, we see Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and others offsetting potential lower volume with higher per-unit revenue as customers order larger, more robust servers purposed for virtualization in place of aging one-trick 1U ponies.
BUT DOES IT WORK?
After running a battery of tests, we were impressed with the outstanding performance of the slim XenEnterprise hypervisor and XenSource's paravirtualization approach for hosting Windows Servers--at times running a truly impressive 99.9% of bare-metal CPU performance (see "Tester's Notebook: Ready, Get Set, Run").
We tested XenEnterprise at our Real-World Partner Labs and found that XenSource has optimized the open source Xen 3.04 hypervisor into a tight, 50,000-line code package for running Microsoft operating systems as well as Linux distros. This design lets the virtualization engine hit bare metal for increased performance and contrasts sharply with the Microsoft and VMware model of running client operating systems on a traditional "fat" host OS.
As more security fears surface around virtualized environments, and virtualization management and security toolsets struggle to keep up with deployments of these environments, we believe that Xen's tight code base, coupled with open source peer review of the hypervisor, will yield glad security tidings.
The pricing news is pretty good, too. XenSource offers a gratis version of XenExpress that supports four XenVMs on one box. XenServer, for $99 annually, lets you host eight XenVMs on one server. The premier product, XenEnterprise 3.2, which is shipping now, is priced at $488 for an annual license or $750 for a perpetual license per dual-socket server.
Neither of these license models includes formal support beyond self-help tools and discussion forums, though XenSource--no doubt mindful of the pall a lack of service contracts casts over enterprise adoption--will provide support for $600 per server per year. You may not need it, however: Like most mainstream open source initiatives, the Xen community has a large peer-to-peer support structure in place. We relied extensively on the knowledge base and discussion forums as we worked through testing for this article, to see what those opting for open support can expect.
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STORAGE QUESTION
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