gplhost
11-22-2009, 04:31 AM
Hi everyone,
I was present at the Xen Summit Asia 2009 at Intel Shanghai, and I was really happy to be there. I wanted to let you know my feelings and what I could see there. Lots of new things have been presented there, and it was really technical, as expected for such events.
It was really international, but as it was in China, many presentations were made in Mandarin, which was quite hard to follow (as my Chinese is far from perfect, and that I am not so much used to listen to technical words in this language).
Here's what I found the most amazing:
I was really amazed by some of the presentation, especially the ones from Jeremy Fitzhardinge that talked about his work on the PVOps dom0 and upstreaming his work to the kernel.org team. His last kernel PVOps Git branch follows the stable branch of kernel.org, and is kept up to date, which I didn't know and was a very good surprise for me.
Ian Pratt made a demo of the new Remus system that has been integrated in the unstable branch of Xen, which enables High Availability (HA) between 2 distant VPS. In his demonstration, the 2 VMs were 320 miles away from each other in the Vancouver area (to be noted that it was a bit hard to demonstrate as there was quite some lag on the WiFi network that was at Intel).
Noboru Iwamatsu from Fujutsu showed us a video on how USB can be assigned from one virtual machine to another. That seemed very easy and well implemented, his video was really demonstrating it well.
George Dunlap explained his work on the virtual machine monitor scheduler, which was really interesting.
The Intel team explained their work on the SR-IOV, VT-d, and I/O in general and how it improves performances For example on network over 10Gbits links, the numbers he presented on his graphs were self explanatory (lower CPU, better throughput), and it feels like we will all look forward in purchasing the new Intel shipsets.
The debugger work form the Oracle people (Zhigang Wang) will for sure improve quality, as well as the Intel QA work.
At the end, I was a bit disappointed that everything is going toward HVM virtual machines as performances are better than on PV domains (yes, you are reading well and I'm not mistaking...). I loved the concept of PV linux, but it doesn't seem to be the future. Anyway, soon, all non-HVM capable hardware will be obsolete, and I don't think it will be so hard to adapt.
I also made a 30 minutes presentation of our panel for its Xen VM reselling capabilities (I didn't tell about the shared hosting part). I was quite stressed at the beginning of the presentation, and it went smoother later... :P
Finally, I was really happy to have spend all this time with everyone. Especially, it was really nice to have the dinner with the Intel virtualization team (they went to ask me what I was doing so I sat on their table...), and I hope I'll be able to build friendship with some of them. I was so happy as well that I could spend a bit of time with Jeremy and Stephen from Citrix to show them around in Shanghai, hoping they enjoyed here. All of them are really nice persons, with a lot of culture background.
All presentations (slides) and videos will soon be uploaded in here:
http://www.xen.org/xensummit/xensummit_fall_2009.html
Stephen Spector said it would be there in the middle of next week, so check it out later, I really think it's worth seeing.
Hoping that you enjoyed reading my quick report,
Thomas
I was present at the Xen Summit Asia 2009 at Intel Shanghai, and I was really happy to be there. I wanted to let you know my feelings and what I could see there. Lots of new things have been presented there, and it was really technical, as expected for such events.
It was really international, but as it was in China, many presentations were made in Mandarin, which was quite hard to follow (as my Chinese is far from perfect, and that I am not so much used to listen to technical words in this language).
Here's what I found the most amazing:
I was really amazed by some of the presentation, especially the ones from Jeremy Fitzhardinge that talked about his work on the PVOps dom0 and upstreaming his work to the kernel.org team. His last kernel PVOps Git branch follows the stable branch of kernel.org, and is kept up to date, which I didn't know and was a very good surprise for me.
Ian Pratt made a demo of the new Remus system that has been integrated in the unstable branch of Xen, which enables High Availability (HA) between 2 distant VPS. In his demonstration, the 2 VMs were 320 miles away from each other in the Vancouver area (to be noted that it was a bit hard to demonstrate as there was quite some lag on the WiFi network that was at Intel).
Noboru Iwamatsu from Fujutsu showed us a video on how USB can be assigned from one virtual machine to another. That seemed very easy and well implemented, his video was really demonstrating it well.
George Dunlap explained his work on the virtual machine monitor scheduler, which was really interesting.
The Intel team explained their work on the SR-IOV, VT-d, and I/O in general and how it improves performances For example on network over 10Gbits links, the numbers he presented on his graphs were self explanatory (lower CPU, better throughput), and it feels like we will all look forward in purchasing the new Intel shipsets.
The debugger work form the Oracle people (Zhigang Wang) will for sure improve quality, as well as the Intel QA work.
At the end, I was a bit disappointed that everything is going toward HVM virtual machines as performances are better than on PV domains (yes, you are reading well and I'm not mistaking...). I loved the concept of PV linux, but it doesn't seem to be the future. Anyway, soon, all non-HVM capable hardware will be obsolete, and I don't think it will be so hard to adapt.
I also made a 30 minutes presentation of our panel for its Xen VM reselling capabilities (I didn't tell about the shared hosting part). I was quite stressed at the beginning of the presentation, and it went smoother later... :P
Finally, I was really happy to have spend all this time with everyone. Especially, it was really nice to have the dinner with the Intel virtualization team (they went to ask me what I was doing so I sat on their table...), and I hope I'll be able to build friendship with some of them. I was so happy as well that I could spend a bit of time with Jeremy and Stephen from Citrix to show them around in Shanghai, hoping they enjoyed here. All of them are really nice persons, with a lot of culture background.
All presentations (slides) and videos will soon be uploaded in here:
http://www.xen.org/xensummit/xensummit_fall_2009.html
Stephen Spector said it would be there in the middle of next week, so check it out later, I really think it's worth seeing.
Hoping that you enjoyed reading my quick report,
Thomas