I’ve been seeing some official Xenserver videos popping up in my suggestions lately, looks like they are trying to grow some interest in the product:
Citrix is just trying to stay relevant. They should trying not being an awful and greedy company first.
While I agree, where is XCP-NG going to be without Xenserver? Are they ready to do all the heavy lifting? They still rely on Xen core features and still try to remain parity and they are still small (and hiring more workers). I think staying parity with Xen may be holding them back in a few areas. But recent threads point toward a big leap in XCP-NG 9 with Alma Linux and possibility to move to a newer long term kernel and all the features that could allow.
Hopefully Citrix doesn’t get more greedy and shut things off or forcefully buy out Vates (stranger things do happen). Or Broadcom could do Broadcom things and buy out Xenserver and close it to “use some of the IP in their other products” (close it to prevent competition).
And all that said, I’ve done a bunch of reading the last few days on Xen Project and some of the history, not too many years ago there are videos saying that the open sourced XCP was going to fail, I think that was a 9 year old video. Glad that it either didn’t happen, or rose from the ashes.
My interest in Xen Project is to look at how this could be different from XCP-NG. For me it’s a huge endevour and going to take some time, but I’d like to see how “basic” Xen works with say a kernel in the 6.x range will work with newer NFS, etc. I think there are gains to be made here, gains I see in ESXi. Something as simple as the NFS option of nconnect=X where X can be 1 to 16 simultaneous streams, ESXi8 defaults to nconnect=4 where the old 4.19 kernel used in XCP-NG is a single stream. Why do I care? Because small reads and writes will be faster with more connections per server and this translates into faster things like migration between storage servers.
You are confused and missing that they forked FROM Citrix code base to make XCP-ng and DO NOT rely on Citrix for the the builds. And since the success of XCP-ng Citrix has done their own re-branding to create confusion between the product they still sell https://www.xenserver.com/ and the open source Xen Project.
The Xen Project https://xenproject.org/ is part of the Linux Foundation of which their board members include the team at Vates and is fully open source.
So if Citrix were to cease to exists, XCP-ng would be impacted.
So Xen project, XCP, and Xenserver do not all have the same core codebase?
Several times I’ve read in the XCP forums that they would take an issue up with the upstream Zenserver (Citrix) and see how both of them wanted to handle the issue. So I know there is some level of parity between Xenserver and XCP-NG, but thought the Xen Project was also part of that core codebase.
Both Citrix and XCP-ng are downstream from the Xen Project code base. But as I said, the Xen Project https://xenproject.org/ is part of the Linux Foundation project and not the same as the Citrix Product called Xenserver.
OK, now I get it. I was thinking that Citrix was upstream of all of them. Makes more sense now.
It might also push me in a direction for some testing, need to find the time for this though, and probably remove one of my other lab servers to make the test subject. Maybe this would be a good thing to use my big Truenas for once I get the mini-NAS fully up to speed.