 Next session this morning, another one that may seem like it's a little on the remedial side, but I think you'll find some value in it, is about Zen, Zen server and Zappy, what's the difference? The two suspects up front here, I'm Russ, I'm Zen evangelist, so that means I have a big mouth and I know where the airport is and I know how to use it, so I run around talking about Zen to whomever and James? My name is James Bourpin, I work for Citrix as head of technology for the Zen server product group and I'm going to help Russ to untangle what's Zen, what's Zen server and to follow up on some of what Ryan talked about a little bit about what XCP is. Alrighty, so this is the basic question, everyone knows what Zen is until you start talking about it and I found this out the hardware, the hardware, I started it as the evangelist for Zen project back in January now and I've been to I think like eight or nine different conferences this year talking to people and inevitably, you know, I stand up, I give my talk about one thing or another and I engage other people afterwards and oh, we're talking about using Zen, etc. and generally 10 to 15 minutes into our discussion, something like a version number will come up and I'll realize they're not talking about the Zen project, they're talking about Zen server or they're not talking about Zen, they're talking about Zappy. So we just want to spend just, you know, 20 minutes here kind of drawing the lines so people understand where they are because it's fuzzy and we understand it's fuzzy and it's fuzzy because we've made it fuzzy, so we're just going to try to clean it up just a little bit and get rid of a little bit of the confusion. So what's Zen itself, the Zen project? The leading open source hypervisor and if you don't believe that, I'll give you the web page where you'll say exactly those words. You know, it's open source now and always and you know, this was two years ago, this was the great misconception that, you know, Zen was dying, Zen was closed source, Zen was a Citrix product. No, Zen is now open source, will remain open source and it's now part of the Linux Foundation collaborative projects so it will very happily and proudly remain open source. Thank you very much. We're celebrating our 10th anniversary. I mean, if you look at the timeline, which we'll get to in a second, it actually started earlier than that but this is 10 years since the first open source release of Zen itself. And as someone mentioned earlier, you know, in industry years, that's a millennium. You know, anytime you can get a decade and it's still running strong and it's also home for several sub-projects, which we'll talk about very briefly. So here's just a short pictorial history. You know, it started with this thing called the Xenoserver project and if you go to the zenproject.org web page, you can actually see some of the original documents that came out of the design. How many people have been to zenproject.org? Okay, good. How many people have accounts there? Okay, the rest of you have homework. It's easy and we won't pester you. And the other thing is we also have a nice little monthly newsletter that just gives you news of the month. So it's, I mean, it's very light. We're not talking about junk. So in case some announcement came out that you're unaware of, it's a nice way to get kind of up to snuff in three minutes. But anyway, so you can find that information out on the website. We see, you know, the initial release. We see small things like, you know, Amazon and Rackspace all coming along. We see the release of a ZenCloud platform, which James will talk about in a few minutes, and on into now. So I mean, this is, you know, in a very short footprint, this is the Zen history. Also, there's more detailed history out on the website. So there are actually several sub-projects under the Zen project. The one that everyone knows, hopefully, is the hypervisor. It is the main game. It's why we're here. Then there's PVops, which technically is not a sub-project, but it is what allowed us to get rid of all those nasty Zen kernels that you had to install. It was brought out in, I think it was Brian's talk earlier, that once upon a time you had to do a lot more. Because of the PVops project now, it's just part of Mainline Linux. So you don't have to do any funny tricks. That's wonderful. We talked about the hypervisor. The Zappy project. We're going to hear about that more in detail later. The Mirage OS, which was talked about earlier as well. This is just wonderful ability to have these small, lightweight, dedicated, little library-based operating systems so that we'll do one thing and do them really well, really quickly, and really lightly. Really neat stuff. Once again, if you go to zenproject.org, we've got all sorts of information out there about that as well. But all of this comes under the auspices of the Zen project. Now, here's a picture that you've probably seen more times than you care to think about if you've attended any Zen talks anywhere. But this is the basic design of the hypervisor. And just to be very clear, because this comes out all the time, it doesn't actually run in the kernel. We see that it sits right on top of the hardware. The bits that are in the kernel, or excuse me, not in the kernel, but what we have sitting above the kernel is the control domain, which can then talk to the hypervisor. And it includes in there the device drivers and the models. So that's all that's necessary there. One of the big takeaways is that since it's not sharing, it doesn't have technically a host machine, the Zen VMs never compete with processes. They compete with other VMs for resources. And that's different inside some other hypervisor schemes. So that's really important to know that it's not a question of how busy some other VM is. It's at the VM level, not the process level. The architecture emphasizes security, and anyone who was at my security talk yesterday, we went through some of the details about that, how that's going to be accomplished. If you weren't there, you can find the slides right now on the Linux Foundation website, and they'll be out on zenproject.org within a few days. And then the use of various tool stacks, which we'll talk about a little bit more too, as this session goes on, for the control domain. That allows the control domain to talk to the hypervisor. The fault currently is XL. If you read older literature, you may see references to XM. XL is sort of XM on steroids. So, you know, go with XL when you can. Well, you do see, you know, we do have support for Libvert and Bersh. So I mean, if you're working in an area that wants to talk to KVM as well, that becomes kind of an easier way to converse. And there is no native GUI, as we've heard earlier. However, there are some very interesting things coming, and notably, Zen Orchestra, we'll be talking about later this afternoon, and a little bit about Zen Center here later in this talk. Zen Project has a number of corporate members, and these are some very notable names up here, and they are all vested in the success of the Zen Project. So if anyone ever tells you that no one cares about Zen, wrong. Just take a look at this picture, and there are some companies that care quite a bit about Zen. We can add one more to that now. We can add NetApp to that now, who joined very recently. Excellent. Okay, I didn't have that on there. Thank you. So I mean, you know, these are people who care for a reason, and if your company isn't up there, and you're doing a lot of work with Zen, you should be asking yourself the question, should our company be talking about joining in the corporate members? It's a really good thing to do. Now, zenproject.org, as I mentioned, it's the hub of information for the Zen Project. So, you know, it's newly revamped and revised when the Zen Project went to the Linux Foundation in April. Zenproject.org came on online. The big thing about it was that we wanted to start being able to reach out to both developers and users. If you remember the old Zen.org, very developer-centric, we wanted to stop that. We wanted to have the information the developers need, but we wanted to make sure that you also had information that users can use. So we've got the new monthly newsletter, as I mentioned, and sign up if you haven't, because we won't pester you right now. It's just a once-a-month thing, and it has no fluff. We don't like fluff, so we're not going to pitch it on you. And then, of course, there is the Zen Project mascot, because a cuddly panda is a terrible thing to waste. And you'll see him all around and so forth. So, and in fact, one of these days, we get around to having a contest to actually name him. We don't actually have a name for this fella. So, you know, keep your eyes open to the website and the newsletter. We may announce a contest soon. But if all of this is Zen Project, then what's Zen Server? Hi. Very good question. Thank you very much. So just actually, while we're on the panda here, this is perhaps a good opportunity to plug the Zen Developer Summit in Edinburgh next month. Edinburgh actually now is home to two pandas, I think, one on loan from China. So if you want to see a real proper life-size panda, that's not quite as fake as the tux that's wandering around downstairs at the moment, come to Edinburgh next month. Anyway, so what's Zen Server? Well, Zen, Zen's the engine, is the way we like to think about it. It's the thing that does the hard bits, the virtualization. It's how you can run multiple VMs on a piece of hardware. It's that low-level tool stack. XM is the CLI's ND. More recently, XL and LibXL, the Zen Lite stack. So what's Zen Server? Well, Zen Server really is a distribution of Zen and all the other components you need to make a virtualization platform. So as we saw, for those of you who were in Brian's talk earlier, we saw there was a kernel in there. We saw the picture with the DOM zero and the kernel running in that. You need to choose your Linux kernel. So that's an important piece. You need some sort of tool stack. You can stop with XL, that's fine. You can write a configuration file, run XL, create a point of that configuration file, go make yourself a domain. What we do with Zen Server is we add a tool on top called Zappy, and I'll talk a bit more about what that is later on. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff, storage, how you set up storage, how you're working, how you manage those things, how you manage the VLANs, how you manage the IP addresses. So really what Zen Server's doing is bringing all the pieces together that you would ordinarily have to put together yourself in a generic Linux environment. Now, we sometimes use the term shrink-wrapped. So it's something you can just take out. And as we saw in Brian's talk earlier on, you can just install this thing onto a box and not have to even worry there's Linux in there. In fact, when Citrix started doing Zen Server, a really called Zen Enterprise back in 2006, the intention was to target Windows admins who we thought would be scared by the Linux internals. So we actually did our best to try and hide the fact there was Linux in there. So we're building on those basic virtualization foundations to add a higher level of system management. Some places we're overlapping with what cloud orchestration stacks are doing. Obviously, Zen Server predates OpenStack and CloudStack and so on. So now there's kind of a choice of different ways to orchestrate your system. So Zen Server, if you like, kind of overlaps a bit with what the orchestration stacks are doing. But there's an awful lot of value added there. So history-wise, we've actually got quite a long history, not as long as Zen. 2006 was when it all started. Zen Server started as a proprietary product of Zen Source, which was a startup that was later acquired by Citrix. It started off very, very basic, with a very small number of customers. I'm going to talk about a very small number. I mean, fewer than we have people in this room. But we've really come on a long way. So Zen Server 6.2 is the most recent shipping product from Citrix. I'm not going to go for a product pitch here. That's not my intention. But that is now a free product that's available for anyone to use all of its features for no charge. Citrix sells a support contract. I'm not going to plug that, but it's very good. And at the same time, we announced that we would be moving the entire of Zen Server to the open source. Now, a number of the pieces had been open sourced already. But this is really just finishing it off and also moving to a more open development model. And for those of you who missed my talk on Monday on the evolution of Zen Server from an open source perspective, the recording of that will hopefully be available soon, if not already. So a little bit about some of the pieces we have, and I'll just nod to the open sourcing as we have a quick look at these. We've got a currently based Zen Server on CentOS 5. It's 5.7, I think, in our most recent shipping. So thank you, KB, for providing that for us. We'll be moving to CentOS 6, probably 64 for the next release in less than six fives out in time. And obviously the Zen 4 CentOS 6 work that Brian told us about earlier on is something that's actually very useful for building the foundations of Zen Server. There's all sorts of other stuff in the box. Storage management, we had a bit of a discussion in the earlier talk about some of the different ways to manage storage. So there's a piece in there, a lot of Python for the control plane. The PV drivers, para-virtualized drivers are device drivers that are aware they're running on top of a Zen hypervisor, but they may actually be running in a fully virtualized guest virtual machine that doesn't know it's being virtualized. So that allows us to get much higher IO throughput. So we actually have Windows drivers that were previously proprietary than they're now becoming open source. There's the Zen Center UI. A Windows, I apologize, .NET based application. Again, we were targeting the Windows IT admin. So we actually originally had a Java UI that was compiled and packaged for both platforms. So, but we moved on to the .NET UI ready to satisfy that particular market. There's also other stuff in the box. So a lot of stuff that actually it's all a lot of open source stuff in there, but stuff that we were not really developing in an open way, big patch cues only published in source RPMs when we published the binary. The thing that we're moving towards now is having everything be an open source project on GitHub or equivalent where that's not suitable and everything's being done in the open. But I won't go into too much detail on that today because we don't have time, but do talk to me or have a look at the video of my talk for Monday. So, zenserver.org. So ZenServer, just to be really, really clear, the Zen project, which Russ talked about, the Linux foundation collaborative project. ZenServer.org is the open source home, the community home for ZenServer. That is not part of the Linux foundation. So Citrix has not given ZenServer the Linux foundation. That's something that we don't think the Linux foundation would want it. They don't host Red Hat. They don't host Ubuntu. They don't host CentOS. And ZenServer basically being a custom Linux distro. They don't host ZenServer either. So zenserver.org is a Citrix-led project. A lot of what we're trying to do is to get things out into the open, open communication, feedback, discussion. What we really want to be able to do is to enable our ecosystem. We have a lot of partner companies building add-ons and services around ZenServer. So actually removing a lot of the barriers is key here. So zenserver.org, there's kind of two things we do. ZenCenter probably being the most obvious one. The UI. The Windows PV drivers are in there too at the moment. But it's also a distribution. We are hacking the what's it out of CentOS 5 at the moment. For which we are deeply sorry. But we've had to make a lot of additions of newer packages, lots of patches. We're trying to move away from that. But at the end of the day, we are doing the job of a distro to some extent. So we're doing that distro job. Management, choice of versions, and so on. As part of zenserver.org. But also, within the ZenServer development team, we are contributing to other projects. So we are using the Zen project. We are using the Linux kernel. But we are making changes to those in order to deliver what we need in ZenServer. So the developers are working within the upstream communities. QMU is another one. There's a few others as well. In order to get the code in we need and then consume those projects within ZenServer. Citrix ZenServer is a commercial product built off of the open source code base. Citrix will be releasing, as it has done for the past seven plus years, a stream of versions of ZenServer. They are now all, as I say, free, all features are free for use. You only pay for support. But you don't have to. We don't have any of the SKU limiting that we had before where the free version didn't have HA, which is something we talked about in the earlier talk. OK. So, Zappy. What's Zappy? We talked a little bit about that. It's a tool stack for managing a Zen system. It adds a higher level of management than the low level LibzenLite tool stack we have at the moment. So LibzenLite really is about taking existing storage, existing networking, Linux bridges, OBSs and so on, and starting and managing the end using those. ZenServer really is orchestrating the creation and mapping and everything that's involved in setting up those entities, managing clustering in a multi-host environment, coordinating the high availability failover and so on. That's actually been open source since 2009. That itself is actually part of the Zen project. It's one of the sub-projects that Russ talked about earlier. And we have, as Brian talked about in his talk earlier on, that is also packaged for Debian and Ubuntu. We've had tech previews of the CentOS package, and I hope we have something a bit more formal on that fairly soon. So, this is one that you wanted me to cover, wasn't it, Russ? Oh, yes, this is something. So what is XCP? Well, this term became rather overloaded. We used it when we first open-sourced the Zappi tool stack back in 2009. The term has come to mean two distinct things. One is a synonym for Zappi itself. So you type app to get installed XCP Zappi. So that's become, the Zen Cloud platform is kind of the selection of packages, Zappi, ZenObsidy, Storage Management and all those things. So that's fine. The other thing that has come to mean is a binary distribution which looks very, very much like ZenServer. So I often call it XCP.iso and it basically is a ZenServer with its branding removed and a few proprietary packages removed. A few proprietary ones left there actually on the Windows drivers. Now that specific use case is kind of evaporated now ZenServer has become completely open-sourced. So following XCP 1.6 and ZenServer 6.1 which are basically the same thing we've converged the two to become ZenServer 6.2 and there is an upgrade path there. And one of the things that that will enable is when Citrix publishes hot fixes for ZenServer previously people have had to unpack those by hand using GPG and stuff extract at the RPMs to apply them to XCP we will be able to have those hot fixes applied to people using ZenServer in an XCP-like fashion. I believe at the moment we are limiting the automation through ZenCenter but ZenCenter is open-sourced and we all can replace if statements if we wish. So that we think will and also helps because we're removing the delay on the XCP releases. It took a very long time if I recall to get XCP 1.6 even though it's basically the same as ZenServer 6.1. So Russ there's a lot of information here. Yes, and there's two minutes left and just because you came here and you thought it's a conference it's easy it's quiz time. So we're going to see how good your knowledge of ZenZenServer and Zappy is. Here we go first question ZenZenServer or Zappy? Let's hear it. I'm listening. I'm listening. ZenZappy answer Zen is the ZenProject mascot. But that also I guess does cover Zappy. Somebody very very on the ball here. Yes, very good. Next question. This is a picture of ZenCenter. Is that ZenZenServer or Zappy? Correct answer. ZenServer. ZenCenter is part of ZenServer and that is now open source. Open at Citrix now what falls under the auspices of a Citrix open source project is that Zen ZenServer or Zappy? ZenServer very good. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects ZenZenServer or Zappy? Zen and Zappy. Zappy is a sub project. So it's still under the Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. So that was a tricky one. Now here's a lovely one. The Xe command line is that part of ZenZenServer or Zappy? Here are all three. I hear Zappy. It's Zappy. The Xe CLI is part of Zappy. And by extension ZenServer for those that said that. Now here we have the Excel command line here. Is that ZenZenServer or Zappy? The answer is Zen. The Excel command line is part of the ZenProject stack and yes you can use it in ZenServer and so forth. We don't always recommend it though. You will be treading on the toes of Zappy. So be careful. Oh well. Then I put a nasty in there. Sorry about that. Okay here's the extra credit. QMU. Is that ZenZenServer or Zappy? Answer a trick question. It's its own project. We just use it. But it's not technically part of the ZenProject. It's not part of any of these projects. So anyway, thank you very much. More information for those who needed of course the ZenProject.org, ZenServer.org the blogs, the wikis and this presentation will be up with all the others later as well as with the video when it becomes available. So thank you very much. So we're going to take a five minute break. Is Larry here? Yes.