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Tag: xen

  • Xen Project Advances Hypervisor Project

    Xen Project Advances Hypervisor Project

    The Xen Project announced this week that the latest version of the open source hypervisor can now take advantage of core scheduling, an experimental technology that enables Xen to group multiple processors together to create a single virtual central processor unit (CPU).

    Lars Kurth, chairperson for the Xen Project advisory board, said this capability also represents an important first step toward developing a more secure form of hyperthreading. Since earlier this year, many IT organizations have turned off hyperthreading because of cybersecurity concerns. However, such decisions have resulted in significant performance penalties for many applications.

    In addition to adding support for core scheduling, version 4.13 of Xen Project Hypervisor adds support for live patching and late uCode loading that makes it possible to install updates at runtime without having to reboot the hypervisor.
    The latest version of Xen also adds support for additional processors, including AMD 2nd Generation EPYC, Hygon Dhyana 18h, Raspberry Pi4 and Intel AVX512-based platforms.

    Finally, version 4.13 of Xen adds support for OP-TEE, which enables all guests to concurrently run trusted Applications on TrustZone, firmware created by ARM to isolate processors on the same system, and improvements to Dom0less, which makes it possible to partition processors running in parallel.

    The Xen Project Group also announced it has created a Functional Safety Working Group, which is committed to making the Xen hypervisor compatible with ASIL-B requirements, a set of compliance requirements defined by the automotive industry. That effort represents a significant challenge because it requires code and development processes to comply with key tenets of ISO 26262, a set of standards for embedding electronics into any road vehicle.

    The Xen Group is also working on developing a secret-free hypervisor, which Kurth said will play a critical role in thwarting side-channel cybersecurity attacks. Cybercriminals can employ side-channel attacks to break encryption algorithms by measuring and analyzing the physical attributes such as the amount of radiation being generated by a processor.

    Kurth said version 4.13 represents a major milestone in the ongoing development of Xen. In the future, Xen will also be able to take advantage of the Rust-vmm project being led by Intel that will make it possible for a processor to run multiple types of hypervisors in a modular fashion.  In addition to providing a more agile way of isolating virtual machines, Rust-vmm will reduce the amount of time required to spin up a virtual machine. Specifically, Intel is trying to make it easier for a processor to be able to run different classes of hypervisors that are optimized for legacy monolithic applications and cloud-native applications based on containers that require a much lighter-weight hypervisor.

    It’s not clear to what degree advances in technologies such as core scheduling will influence the selection of hypervisors and virtual machines. However, from a DevOps perspective, it’s clear core capabilities being added to the next generation of hypervisors will not only improve application performance, but they should also significantly advance best DevSecOps practices.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Citrix puts DevOps front and center

    Citrix puts DevOps front and center

    I had the privilege of attending Citrix Synergy 2014 in Anaheim at the beginning of May. Citrix unveiled a variety of new and updated products, but one announcement in particular surprised me a little. Citrix talked about new capabilities for automation with a very DevOps-ish approach.

    During a keynote presentation at Citrix Synergy 2014, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, senior vice president and general manager for the enterprise and service provider division at Citrix talked about automatic provisioning through Xen Desktop, and creating blueprints for deployment. He didn’t overtly call it DevOps during the keynote, but it all seemed very similar to what other DevOps tools and services accomplish.

    I followed up with Citrix, and had a conversation with Steve Shah. Shah told me that DevOps is absolutely front and center in the thought process for Citrix when it comes to developing products and services for its customers, as well as for mapping out its future strategies.

    Shah was at one point a bit of a DevOps naysayer. In an article in 2011, Shah questioned the credibility of DevOps and wondered whether it would survive as an actual thing, or if it was really just a flash-in-the-pan buzzword. Three years later and still gaining momentum, I think we can safely say that Shah’s doom and gloom assessment was off base.

    Citrix understands the need and the value for automating routine aspects of provisioning and managing virtual systems. According to Shah, though, one of the things Citrix has noted about the broader landscape is that there is no clear platform for doing DevOps. There are a wide variety of tools and services with a few leaders, but no clear “winner”.

    Shah told me that Citrix is only one part of a much larger solution, and it respects that it has to play nice with a wide variety of other products and services, or customers will find other solutions. There are too many unique, custom applications out there for Citrix to individually address them all, so Citrix has instead focused on creating open APIs that enable vendors or customers to develop their own methods of integrating with Citrix.

    Another area where Citrix has embraced DevOps—whether it is openly called that or not—is through the use of Blueprints. Citrix determined that there are certain deployment scenarios that are very common for customers across all industries. Rather than having each one of them struggle to develop their own solutions, Citrix designed Blueprints of common scenarios that customers can use as a foundation for their own environments—similar in many respects to the Recipes and Cookbooks used with Chef, a popular DevOps platform.

    My revelations from the Citrix Synergy keynote, and my subsequent conversation with Citrix made two things clear. First, many organizations may be embracing elements of DevOps without even realizing or calling it that. There are things that just make sense when managing a large, rapidly evolving environment that naturally lead to implementing aspects of DevOps. Flipping that point upside down, those same needs are more or less the origin of the DevOps movement.

    Second, DevOps is gaining momentum and becoming more mainstream as time goes on. While many still struggle to define DevOps, it shows up in day-to-day operations, and in the platforms and tools organizations use whether they understand it or not, and whether they call it DevOps or not.