Slides presented at the openSUSE Mini-Summit, February 2015 about using Xen Project in the SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

1. Deploying OpenStack
Using the Xen Project Hypervisor on SUSE OpenStack Cloud

2. Why Choose the Xen Project Hypervisor
for Your SUSE OpenStack Cloud?

3. 3
Reason 1: Where Xen Project is Today
• Xen Project powers many of the largest clouds in the
world:
‒ Amazon AWS, Huawei in Asia, Rackspace Public cloud, etc.
• It is backed by many of the largest players in the
industry:
‒ Amazon, Google, Verizon, Oracle, NetApp, Intel, AMD...
‒ http://xenproject.org/directory/project-members.html
• Established track record
‒ Twelve years of service this year

4. 4
Reason 1: Where Xen Project is Today
• Scalable
• Reliable
• Securability
‒ Extremely powerful security capabilities
‒ See “XPUS14: Introducing the Advanced Security Features of
the Xen Project Hypervisor” in the Presentations and Videos
section of XenProject.org
• Multimodal
‒ PV, HVM, PVHVM, PVH

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Reason 2: Designed for Cloud
• Before the Cloud was the Cloud, someone had an
idea:
A new distributed computing paradigm, termed global public
computing, which allows any user to run any code anywhere.
Such platforms price computing resources, and ultimately
charge users for resources consumed.
‒ From a paper about the Xenoservers project at Cambridge University in the late
1990s
‒ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xeno/publications.html

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Reason 3: Innovations for the Future
• Empowering the Next Generation Cloud:
‒ Pioneering highly dense, small VMs which are small & secure
‒ Going from dozens of VMs per host today to potentially thousands
‒ See the Rise of the Unikernel video at XenProject.org
‒ Moving into the Embedded space
‒ Xen Automotive subproject
‒ Cell phones
‒ ARM devices

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Reason 3: Innovations for the Future
• XenGT
‒ Virtualization of the GPU
‒ Traditional virtualization was headless; no longer true!
‒ See the demo in Presentations & Videos on XenProject.org
• Empowering Datacenters
‒ COLO: Non-stop high-availability for VMs (4.6 targeted)
• Real-time schedulers under development
• The Cloud is too important to leave to a hypervisor
which is not aggressively empowering the next
generation in Cloud!

8. 8
Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack
• The Project lets interested parties do as they wish
‒ No corporate plan to fulfill
‒ No target demographics; no one to say “we're not interested”
‒ This philosophy served us well
• But, initially, few came forward in OpenStack
‒ SUSE made Xen Project work out-of-the-box in their offering,
but few others
‒ Jim Fehlig of SUSE pioneered libvirt support, which is now the
preferred interface for Xen Project in OpenStack (Feb 2015)

9. 9
Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack
• Xen Project Platform Team awakens to the problem
‒ In late 2014, the team begins focus on OpenStack integration
‒ Stefano Stabellini moves the integration forward
‒ Anthony Perard submits patches to OpenStack, accepted in
February 2015
‒ Now standard OpenStack supports Xen Project out of the box!

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Reason 4: Commitment to OpenStack
• Moving up the OpenStack supported hypervisor matrix
‒ Currently Group C (as of Q1 2015)
‒ We anticipate entering Group B in Q2 2015
‒ Target to become Group A before 2015 comes to a close
• Documentation
‒ As of Q3 2014, there was nothing on wiki.XenProject.org
‒ Now, multiple pages covering installation, configuration
‒ Blog posts
‒ OpenStack manual needs updating next (still cites XAPI only)

11. How Can I Make it Happen?

12. 12
How Do I Optimize It?

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Xen Project Optimizations
• Set Domain 0 Memory from 1 to 4 GB
‒ dom0_mem=1024M
• Set Domain 0 VCPUs to 4
‒ dom0_max_vcpus=4 dom0_vcpus_pin
• Use LVM for local storage
‒ VOLUME_GROUP=volume_group_name
• PV versus HVM guests
‒ nova image-meta set vm_mode=HVM
‒ Nova image-meta delete vm_mode