XenSource Offers Embedded Hypervisor for Servers

Published: September 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When is the last time you thought about the Basic Input/Output System inside your computer? If you bought a preconfigured machine, or had one handed to you by the IT department, the answer is almost certainly, "Never." Decades ago, when PCs were new and a server was called a system and most people never even saw one, much less owned one, BIOS settings were important and more people knew what they were. The server virtualization hypervisor is the BIOS of the 2010s.

For those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about servers and systems and who have been watching server virtualization over the years, it is intuitively obvious that the one thing that a hypervisor needs to be, and which is most certainly is not, is a basic part of the server, much as a BIOS has been. And it needs to be transparent, just like a BIOS is. And finally, it needs to be a relatively small part of the cost of a server, like a BIOS is and most absolutely unlike server virtualization hypervisors are today. It can cost two to three times the cost of a physical server to equip it with a full set of virtualization tools from VMware, and even the basic hypervisor costs hundreds of dollars each to get commercial-grade support. There are a number of ways for people to embed a hypervisor in the system--I have said for a number of years that the hypervisor needs to be a redundant component on a motherboard, implemented in a CMOS static memory much as the BIOS is, perhaps loaded from a tiny flash memory that can be updated as the hypervisor is tweaked to support new peripherals or gets security and bug fixes.

Yesterday, XenSource, the commercial entity behind the open source Xen hypervisor that was spun out of Cambridge University and a company that Citrix Systems is in the process of buying for $500 million, takes the first step in this direction of making the hypervisor a basic and invisible part of an X64 server. Specifically, XenSource is launching what it calls XenExpress OEM Edition, which server and perhaps even PC makers can pre-install on flash memory or disk drives to have the Xen hypervisor configured and ready to run on a particular machine, including virtual drivers for physical components used by the system.

XenExpress V4 is, of course, the freebie version of XenSource's commercially supported products. It is a bare-bones hypervisor that runs on single-socket or two-socket servers, and is crimped to address only 4 GB of main memory and support only four virtual machines. XenServer V4, the company's midrange product, expands up to 128 GB of main memory on two-socket machines and has unlimited VM guests, and XenEnterprise V4, the flagship product, can span as many CPU sockets as a server can provide, control up to 128 GB of memory and have an unlimited number of VM guests, and has all of the VM migration, management, and storage features that XenSource offers. XenServer costs $750 for a perpetual license, while XenEnterprise costs $2,499 for a perpetual license (including the future Veritas Storage Foundation file system, which will be bundled thanks to a deal with Symantec in the fourth quarter).

"No matter what anyone says, the race is on toward hardware," says Simon Crosby, vice president of strategy and corporate development at XenSource, who was an early proponent of the idea of embedding hypervisors into servers. "And we think this is a compelling value proposition for our partners. We have long thought that virtualization should be part of the price of a system, and that server buyers should be able to make use of all of the virtualization goodness inside machines from the start."

It is unclear if XenSource's OEM customers are actually paying for the XenExpress OEM Edition, but perhaps they are not considering XenExpress is already free for anyone to use. Any server maker who wanted to embed XenExpress on a flash or preinstall it on a hard drive could presumably do this without the blessing of XenSource. But getting the blessing of XenSource as well as that of the operating system suppliers--particularly Microsoft, given the fact that most virtualization on the X64 platform is for Windows, not Linux--is important.

The announcement of XenExpress OEM Edition comes just as rumors that VMware might launch a so-called "light" edition of its popular ESX Server hypervisor, which can be installed on bare-metal servers, unlike its freebie VMware Server, which runs a hypervisor on top of a Windows or Linux instance. If VMware does launch ESX Server Light--which it could do this week at its own VMworld 2007 trade show--it is equally likely that it will be provided in a similar OEM fashion to server makers.

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