Today, the Xen Project is happy to welcome XCP-ng as an incubation project. XCP-ng is a fully open-source virtualization platform and is a result of the massive cooperation between individuals as well as companies.
XCP-ng fits well into the Xen Project ecosystem for many reasons. In the past, the Xen Project was primarily focussed on providing code to system integrators, such as distros. Consequently, the project never connected well with it’s end-user community.
XCP-ng includes some key features inherited from Xen Project as the ability to live migrate VMs without interruption, scalability and security but also brings a whole new ecosystem as a modern Web-ui (Xen Orchestra), compatibility with recognized solution on the market (eg. Netdata) and turnkey installer to ease the adoption.
XCP-ng provides a central, validated distribution that delivers Xen. Why is this important? It’s a streamlined way for users to gain access and creates a default go-to solution for the community. The inclusion of XCP-ng with its large and active user community into the Xen project creates a bridge between users and developers. The healthy flow of knowledge sharing ensures input from end-users gets incorporated into new releases.
XCP-ng not only bridges a gap, but it helps build a bridge to the future. The XCP-ng project is investing heavily into research and development which will bring improvements and features to the Xen Project Hypervisor, and valuable contributions into the Xen Project. Adding XCP-ng to the Xen Project expands the overall community and value.
XCP-ng’s project lead is Olivier Lambert. He started XCP-ng in early 2018, as a natural successor of the original “XCP”, Xen Cloud Platform. XCP-ng is shorthand for Xen Cloud Platform – next generation. This was a logical choice as Xen Orchestra, a Web UI for controlling XenServer or Xen infrastructure and also created by Olivier 7 years ago, would use the exact same API to talk to XCP itself. There was an opportunity to create a complete and coherent stack, from the virtualization platform to the management/backup, in a truly open fashion: this was the vision from the start.
In addition to Olivier, XCP-ng is co-maintained by Samuel Verschelde, a long-time contributor of Mageia, a Linux distribution using a similar package system to XCP-ng.
Additional Resources and Getting Involved
To get connected to the XCP-ng community, check out the XCP-ng forum. If you are attending FOSDEM on Feb 1 and 2, and want to meet the team live, in person, please stop by the XCP-ng booth located on K level 2 (group E) booth number 13.
Project Mainainter, Oliver Lambert will be speaking at FOSDEM. Check out his talk, “Landscape of new challenges in modern virtualization platforms: Tackling new issues in virtualization: security, performance use cases and more” happening Sunday, February 2nd at 10:00 am in room H.1309 (Van Rijn).
Also, registration and for call for papers for the upcoming Xen Developer and Design Summit is now open! Learn more here.