My name is Mike McClurg, and I am a Citrix developer working on the Xen API (xapi) and the Xen Cloud Platform. I have recently been chosen as the new lead for the XCP project, and there are a few exciting new developments that I’d like to share with you.
As you may have heard, both Citrix and Canonical have recently announced their support for OpenStack, an open source cloud controller sponsored by Rackspace and NASA. In order to make the Xen API toolstack the best solution for running OpenStack on the Xen platform, we’ve decided to port XCP’s Xen API toolstack to Ubuntu. This would allow you to do ‘apt-get install xapi’, and effectively turn your Ubuntu machine into a Xen Cloud Platform server.
As part of this project, we aim to move XCP to a fully open development process that will allow much greater participation from the Xen community. Building individual toolstack components will no longer require an SDK environment. XCP source repositories will be updated more frequently. Releases of the monolithic, CentOS-based XCP appliance will become more frequent as well.
With the recent announcement of full Xen dom0/domU support in Linux 3.0, and the Xen API toolstack moving to support Ubuntu and other distributions, this is a really exciting time to be a part of Xen.
