3. Xen.Org Changes ®
• Welcome Lars Kurth as new Community
Manager!
– Thanks to Stephen Spector for a great job done
• Lars’ Mission: Encourage more vendor
engagement and co-ordination and co-
operation in the community; Foster closer
links with related OSS communities
3
4. Development Activity ®
Xen-Devel Mailing List Activity
8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0
4
6. Calendar Review ®
• Aug 2010: XenDirections in Boston, USA
• Sep 2010: XenDirections in Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Postponed from Nov 2011: XenSummit
Seoul, South Korea
• March 2011: Xen Hackathon, Cambridge UK
• July 2011: OSCON, Portland, USA
• Summer 2011: 6 Google Summer of Code
students working on Xen 6
7. Xen 4.1 Release – 21 March 2011 ®
• Key Features
– New “XL” lightweight control stack
– Memory Introspection API
– CPU Pools for partitioning
– Very large system support (>255 CPUs)
– Experimental: credit2 scheduler; Remus FT;
Emergency swap
7
8. Community Interactions ®
• Linux
– Privileged domain support upstream in Linux 3.0
– Guest optimizations: use the optimal
combination of h/w and s/w virtualization
• QEMU
– Xen qemu target now upstream
• OpenStack
– XCP integration with OpenStack 8
9. Secure Isolation ®
• Maintaining isolation between VMs is priority #1
– Essential for Cloud, and for Client
– Spatial and Temporal isolation
• Use good software engineering practice
– Thin hypervisor: minimize code running with privilege
– Disaggregate and de-privilege functionality into dedicated Service VMs
– Narrow interfaces between components
– Hypervisors are simpler than OSes, simpler than OS kernels
– Use modern high-level languages where possible
• New hardware technologies help
– VT-x, VT-d, EPT: reduce software complexity, enhanced protection
– TPM/TXT: Enable Dynamic Root of Trust 9
10. XenClient XT / Qubes OS ®
• First products configured to take advantage
of the security benefits of Xen’s architecture
• Isolated Driver Domains
• QEMU Emulation Domains
• Service VMs (global and per-guest)
• Xen Security Modules / SElinux
• Measured Launch (TXT)
10
13. XenClient XT Architecture ®
Service VMs
User VM User VM
Receiver
Isolation
Isolation
Network
for XC
VPN
Control
Domain
SELinux Policy Granularity Policy Granularity
Xen
Xen Security Modules
VT-d TXT
Intel vPro Hardware
VT-x AES-NI
13
14. Disaggregation ®
• Unique benefit of the Xen architecture:
• Security
– Minimum privilege; Narrow interfaces
• Performance
– Lightweight e.g. minios directly on hypervisor
– Exploit locality – service VMs see a subset of the machine,
run close to resources with which they interact
• Reliability
– Able to be safely restarted
14
15. Isolated Driver VMs for High Availability ®
• First implemented in 2004
350
• Detect failure e.g. 300
– Illegal access 250
200
– Timeout
150
• Kill domain, restart 100
– E.g. Just 275ms outage from 50
failed Ethernet driver 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
• New work uses restarts to time (s)
enhance security
16. Proposal ®
• We should strive to get all Xen products and
deployments to take full advantage of the
Xen architecture
• We need to make this much easier!
• Proposal: define and maintain a reference
architecture and implementation that
embodies best practice recommendations
16
17. Reference Architecture ®
• Define using new technologies
– Latest stable Xen
– Linux 3.x pvops
• Optimization effort required
– Libxl control stack
• For easy consumption by other vendor tool stacks
17
18. Target Features ®
• Network restart-able driver domains
– Integrated OpenFlow vswitch
• Storage restart-able driver domains
– Also allows easier deployment of new storage options e.g. vastsky, ZFS
• Qemu emulation domains
• Xen Security Modules
• Measured Launch
• Roadmap for enhanced security and performance
features
– E.g. the SR-IOV network plugin / vswitch architecture
18
19. Implementation ®
• Need an initial reference implementation
– Easily consumable by users
• XCP could fulfil this role
– Showcase latest Xen technologies
– Optimized for OpenStack
• Aim to be as kernel/toolstack etc agnostic to
allow easy adoption by all vendors
19
20. Summary ®
• Xen project continues to thrive!
– Great success in Cloud and Client
• Key architectural security, reliability and
performance benefits that are unique to Xen
– We need to do a better job of getting the
message out!
– We need to do a better job of actually taking
advantage of the benefits
20
22. Xen Today ®
• ~20% enterprise server market share
• >80% of the Public Cloud is Xen based
– World's largest virtualization deployments are Xen based
• Development Community: over 50 Companies,
25 Universities, from 25 Countries, ~250 developers
– More than 20,000 code submissions
• Used in Severs, Desktops, Laptops, Storage Appliances,
Network Appliances and Smart Phones
– x86, IA64, ARM support
23. Xen Powers the World’s 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 ”
24. Xen Tops Performance Comparisons ®
“Xen is the Porsche of hypervisors”
Keith Ward, Virtualization Review
“Xen outperforms VMware ESX 3.5
by 41% in user scalability tests.”
The Tolly Group
25. ®
Pioneers of
OS Para-virtualization
Xen Hypervisor
First and Best to
support new
CPU, chipset,
and Smart IO
Technologies
28. Hardware Fault Tolerance ®
Restart-HA monitors hosts
and VMs to keep apps
running
Hardware Fault Tolerance
with deterministic replay
or checkpointing
Xen’s Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance enables true
High Availability for unmodified applications and operating systems
29. Hardware Fault Tolerance ®
• University of British Columbia’s “Remus” project is
now in xen 4.0
• Smart checkpointing approach yields excellent
performance
– VM executes in parallel with checkpoint transmission, with all externally
visible state changes suppressed until checkpoint receipt acknowledged
– Checkpoints delta compressed
• Checkpointing possible across wide-area, even for multi-
vCPU guests
29
30. SR-IOV ®
• SR-IOV: Single Root IO Virtualization
– Virtualization friendly IO devices
• High performance, high efficiency, low latency
• Enables even the most demanding applications to
now be virtualized
• Compatible with live relocation via hotplug
• World First, demonstrated at Intel Developer
Forum in September!
30
31. SR-IOV NIC Demonstration ®
Dell 10G Switch
Dell R710 Server Dell R710 Server
XenServer and Intel 10G SR-IOV NIC XenServer and Intel 10G SR-IOV NIC
NFS Common
Storage w/OpenFiler
Dell R710 Server
XenServer and Intel 10G SR-IOV NIC
• Full 20Gb/s bi-directional throughput to VMs
• Low latency, High CPU efficiency
• Live relocation between hosts - Even hosts with different NICs 31
32. Network Performance ®
35
30
usercopy
25
kern
CPU (%)
20 201% Type-0 xen1
15
123% 103% grantcopy
10 100%
kern0
5
0
xen0
s/w only basic smart SR-IOV native
NIC NIC
• New Smart NICs reduce CPU overhead substantially
• Care must be taken with SR-IOV NICs to ensure benefits
of VM portability and live relocation are not lost
• Need for an industry standard for “driver plugins”
34. Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) ®
• XCP Expands Xen.org’s scope beyond the core
hypervisor, to create a full virtual infrastructure layer for
Cloud deployments
– Simplify and streamline use of Xen by Cloud providers and vendors
– Promote greater standardisation of components between vendors
• Advanced virtual infrastructure to enable Virtual Private
Datacenters rather than just Virtual Private Servers
– Multi-tenant hosts, networking, storage, etc
– Promote interoperability between xen-based clouds and other clouds
– Drive standards activities via DMTF
34
36. ®
Where Xen Cloud Platform Fits
Management API
& OVF Format
VM
VM VM
VM
VM VM
Mgt
State
Mgt
State
VM
Mgt Resource Pool
State VM
Mgt
State
VM
37. XCP 0.2 ®
• Xen 3.4; Linux 2.6.27; optimized dom0 file system
• xapi toolstack
– Resource Pools; VM, host, networking and storage
management; snapshots and checkpoints; live and persistent
performance statistics; status alerting; role-based access
control; OVF/CIM support
• Windows PV Drivers; Full installer etc.
• Open vSwitch
37
38. ®
New Open vSwitch
Isolation · Resource control · Multi-tenancy · Visibility · Security
VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM
Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor
• Open Source Virtual Switch maintained at www.openvswitch.org
• Rich layer 2 feature set
39. ®
Distributed vSwitch
Built-in policy-based ACLs move with VMs
VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM
Hypervisor Hypervisor
Virtual Interface (VIF) {MAC, IP} ACLs Hypervisor
permit tcp 10.0.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit tcp 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit tcp 172.16.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit udp 10.0.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit udp 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit udp 172.16.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq domain
permit tcp 10.0.0.0 0.0.0.255 10.20.0.0 0.0.0.255 eq 123
Distributed Virtual Switch
40. ®
Distributed vSwitch
Isolation · Resource control · Multi-tenancy · Visibility · Security
VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM VM
Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor
Distributed Virtual Switch
Distributed Virtual Switch
Tenant A
Tenant B
41. XCP 1.0 Plans ®
• New Storage Repository plug-ins
– For cloud-optimized storage models
• libxenlight integration
• Enhanced vswitch capabilities
• pvops domain0
• Better integration of OVF support
• Secure boot and attestation
• Cloud orchestration and management APIs
• Easier complete build environment
41
43. The Xen Client Initiative ®
• Formed in 2007 to develop Xen for desktop and laptop
• Develop enhanced power management, USB, WiFi,
WWAN, 3D Graphics, fingerprint reader, multi-touch, etc
• Support for latest hardware technologies
• Tiny footprint hypervisor, Embeddable in Flash memory
or small disk partition
• Aiming to make virtualization ubiquitous on client
devices...
43
44. Client Hypervisor Benefits ®
• Security, Manageability, Supportability, Auditability
• Building Multi-Level Secure systems
– Run multiple VMs with policy controlled information flow
• E.g. Personal VM; Corporate VM; VM for web browsing; VM for banking
– Trusted hypervisor provides secure isolation
• Enables “out-of-band” management and policy
enforcement via Service VMs
– Malware detection, remote access, image update, backup, VPN, etc.
Requires a true type-1 hypervisor architecture
Xen is ideally suited to this!
44
45. Xen Client Architecture ®
User VM1 User VM2
Control Service
Domain VM
Xen Hypervisor
Audio USB GPU TXT
x86 Hardware
Disk ACPI NIC TPM
46. “Business” & “Personal” Environments ®
Business Personal
• Locked Down • Allows Local App Installs
• Minimal Management
• No Local App Installs
– Virus Scanner
• Tightly Managed – Security Patches
• Self-Service Corporate • No SLA
App Installs – Self-Service Wipe
47. Conclusions ®
• The Xen Community continues to grow
from strength to strength
• Xen’s architecture makes it #1 in security,
with great performance
– From Cloud to Client
• Xen.org’s role is broadening to develop
whole reference platforms, promote
standards, interopability 47
