XS Japan 2008 Project Status English

Xen Project Overview and Update

Ian Pratt, Chairman of Xen.org, and
Chief Scientist, Citrix Systems Inc.

Xen Community Story
• 2002 Oct Xen hypervisor development starts
• 2004 Xen 1.0 and 2.0 released, First Xen developer’s summit
• 2005 XenSource founded, Xen 3.0 released
• 2006 CPU enhancements for virtualization ship; Linux distros ship Xen
All x86 OSes “enlightened”: Vmware, Microsoft adopt paravirtualization
First XenEnterprise release
Amazon EC2 Launches
• 2007 XenSource acquired by Citrix
• 2008 Xen embedded in Flash on HP/Dell servers
First embedded Xen on laptops

2
© 2007 Citrix Systems, Inc. — All rights reserved

Xen Today
• ~17% enterprise server market share (Yankee, Aug 08)
• World's largest virtualization deployments are Xen based
• Community: over 50 Companies, 20 Universities,
from 20 Countries, ~250 developers
• More than 10,000 code submissions since Xen 3.0
• x86, IA64, ARM support
• In Severs, Laptops, Storage & Network Appliances, PDAs

3

Xen Powers the World’s IT Infrastructure Clouds

“ Xen is great. It’s powerful and
easy to use. But most
important is the very active
community around it.
That was a very big reason for
us in selecting Xen.
”
Werner Vogels
CTO, Amazon.com

4

Congratulations, and Thank You!

2008 Winner, Server Virtualization
Best of Open Source Software Awards
5

Xen Project Mission

• Build the industry standard open source hypervisor
• Lead the industry in virtualization performance
• Ensure continued stability and high quality in the code base
• Support multiple CPU types; big and small systems
• Foster and sponsor innovation
• Drive toward vendor interoperability and compatibility

6

Xen: An Open Reference Standard

Xen
Citrix, Intel, AMD, VA Linux, Fujitsu,
IBM, HP, Unisys, SGI, Samsung, Sun,
Red Hat, Novell, DoD, NSA (over 50
orgs)

7

The Xen Project Advisory Board
• Represents major contributors and vendors that offers Xen based
products. Current members:

• Defines and approves the Xen® Trademark Policy
(“What is Xen?”)
• Oversees community code practices and roadmap
8

Virtualization Benefits

Avoid planned downtime

X
with VM Relocation

Dynamically re-balance
workload to meet app
SLAs or to saver power

9

Virtualization Benefits

Restart-HA monitors hosts

X
and VMs to keep apps
running

Hardware Fault Tolerance
with deterministic replay
X or checkpointing

10

Leaders in
OS Enlightenment
Xen Hypervisor

First and Best to
support new
Intel VT & AMD-V, (Also Hyper-V compatib
mart IO & chipset
Technologies

11

Unlocking Hardware Innovation

Enhanced Security
Enhanced Security
• TPM and secure boot (TXT)
• TPM and secure boot (TXT)
• IOMMU to protect device DMA accesses
• IOMMU to protect device DMA accesses
• Full Execute-Disable (NX/XD)
• Full Execute-Disable (NX/XD)

Hardware Virtualization Support
Hardware Virtualization Support
• Nested Page Tables (VT2/VMI)
• Nested Page Tables (VT2/VMI)
• FlexPriority, FlexMigrate
• FlexPriority, FlexMigrate
• Smart NICs (e.g. VT-C/VMDq) and HBAs
• Smart NICs (e.g. VT-C/VMDq) and HBAs
Multi-core Processors
Multi-core Processors
Only a hypervisor can deliver the
• More efficient utilization
• More efficient utilization
benefits of the new hardware
• Hides complexity from guests
• Hides complexity from guests

12

OS Paravirtualization (Enlightenment)
• Extending the OS to be aware it is running in a virtualized
environment
• For performance and enhanced correctness
• IO, memory size, CPU, MMU, time
• In Xen <2.0, some paravirtulizations were compulsory to close x86
virtualization holes
• Intel VT / AMD-V allow incremental paravirtualization
• Paravirtualization is still very important for performance, and works
along side enhancements to the hardware
• Higher-level paravirtualizations yield greatest benefit
13

SPECjbb2005 Comparison
RHEL5 guest / SPECjbb2005 Sun JVM
1.2
Relative score to native

1

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
1-vcpu 2-vcpu 4-vcpu
Native ESX 3.0.1 XenEnterprise 3.2
14 14

w2k3 Terminal Server Concurrent Session test

15

Hypervisor Security
• “hidden hypervisor” attack is a myth, but exploitation of an installed
hypervisor is a real and dangerous threat
• Hypervisors add more software and thus increase the attack surface
• Network-facing control stack
• VM containment
• Xen much smaller and defensible than an OS
• Xen’s “strength in depth” approach
• Disaggregate, De-privilege, narrow interfaces
• Xen Security Modules from the NSA
• Measured launch: TPM/TXT/SKINIT

16

Improving Security with Hypervisors
• Hypervisors allow administrative policy enforcement outside the OS
• Firewalls, IDS, malware scanning etc
• More robust as not so easily disabled
• Provides protection within a network rather than just at borders
• Hardening OSes with immutable memory, taint tracking, logging
and replay
• Backup policy, multi-path IO, HA, FT etc
• Availability and Reliability
• Xen Introspection API project (extending XenAccess library)

17

Xen Client : A Hypervisor for Client Devices
• Security, Manageability and Supportability
• Building Multi-level secure systems
• Run multiple guest VMs with very controlled information flow
• Enables Bring-Your-Own-PC model
• Corporate VM; VM for web browsing; VM for banking
• Migration of VMs between datacentre and laptops for offline use
• Seamless merging of VM displays

• “Embedded IT” virtual appliances
• IDS, Malware detection, remote access, backup etc.
• Security requires a true hypervisor architecture
18

Xen Client Initiative
• 12 Vendors Collaborating on
architecture and implementation of
Xen client hypervisor
• Security is a key requirement

19

From Laptops to Phones
• Smart phones and portable devices
• Xen ARM
• Smart phones now suffer from many of the same problems as PCs
• Simple restricted use cases:
• Three VMs running on one CPU:
• Real time VM for controlling the radio
• VM for vendor/operator -supplied s/w
• VM for user-downloaded software

20

Roadmap Current Projects
• XenClient
• Xen Introspection API
• Fault Tolerance
• “Difference Engine” memory optimizations
• Cloud infrastructure services

21

Closing Remarks
•Virtualization is destined to become ubiquitous
• Every machine, Every workload
• Built in to the platform
• Client devices as well as servers
•Xen offers the best performance and the most secure
architecture
• Xen is powered by a growing community with a diverse range of
products and services

22

XS Japan 2008 Project Status English

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XS Japan 2008 Project Status English