By Ryan Compton

I had the chance to speak with Stephen Spector of Xen.org about his work on this exciting virtualization project. We spoke about the basics of Xen, Xen development, and Xen in Antarctica, which is one of the goals for the Xen Around the World project.

What does Xen do?

Xen is a collaboration between industry giants, universities, and hobbyists to provide an open source (GPLv2) hypervisor for server virtualization. The hypervisor provides a layer between the guest and the hardware allowing for multiple operating systems to be run on the same server.

How does Xen differ from other hypervisor’s?

Xen is developed by a combination of corporations where each company builds their unique strength into the software. Intel optimizes hardware, Oracle virtualized databases and Citrix works with desktop virtualization. VMware, our major propitary competitor, develops all their software alone and thus relies on a smaller support base.

Why is it exciting to be working in virtualization now?

Only about 20% of servers are virtual right now and that number is growing rapidly. As high speed internet becomes more widely available cloud computing will only continue to grow at least as fast as it has in the past few years. Xen is already being used for Amazon’s EC2 and Citrix systems’s servers.

How can people become involved with the development of Xen?

First off, get to our friendly mailing lists and participate in the conversations. The Xen hypervisor  is a highly sophisticated construct that most hobbyists are not involved with, at this level changes must be approved by the hypervisor’s creator, Keir Fraiser. Most of the development that we see from individuals comes at the management space layer. We also have people that contribute by  simply answering questions on the message boards or explain how they use Xen.

I noticed you have a project “Xen Around the World“, where are some of the more interesting places you’ve found Xen?

The goal here is to get Xen in Antarctica. So far we’ve hit every other continent but we still can’t find a way to get there. There is one group using Xen in a fairly remote part of Africa but we can’t seem to find out exactly what they are doing there. There’s also a group of guys in Britain who run horse racing bets on an OS/2 network, they used Xen to keep their bets going while they updated their hardware.

Anything coming up?

We’ve got a conference in San Jose on April 28th and 29th. That’s a real good place to be if you want to get to know some of the fine details of the hypervisor’s memory mapping.

For more information Steve can be found traveling to any of the following locations.

Ryan Compton’s Homepage http://www.math.ucla.edu/~rcompton/