From Zero to the Cloud with Todd Deshane and Patrick F. Wilbur
Todd Deshane and Patrick F. Wilbur are co-authors of the book “Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization” and at LISA’10 they will teach the class “Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor”. I had a chat with them and talked about their book, their class and how they updated their material for the cloud computing age.
Marius Ducea: Todd, Patrick, why don’t we start by having both of you quickly introduce yourselves to our readers?
Todd Deshane: Sure. I’m a recent graduate from Clarkson University, where I got a Ph.D in Engineering Science; I’ve been a member of xen.org community for quite sometime, basically ever since it came out.
Patrick Wilbur: I’m a graduate student, Ph.D in Computer Science at Clarkson University, I’ve been involved with Xen for a couple of years, and this is related to the research that I’ve been doing at the university, and with Todd we are both co-authors of the book “Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization”.
MD: You mentioned your book; I’m curious how did you guys end up writing a book? Can you talk about your experience in doing that?
TD: Since we were involved with Xen in our research and published a paper right after Xen came out, the publishing company thought that we were the best ones to write this book external to the group at Cambridge that developed Xen, so they contacted our advisor Jeanna Matthews and a group of people from our lab were interested to work on this and write the book. This is how it all started.
MD:There are seven co-authors to your book; how did you collaborate with so many people working on this?
TD: It is a lot of work to write a book. We spent a lot of time working on this, and split the chapters based on the expertise each one of us had in different areas. Of course later we had to get together and read each others chapters and make it a uniform book. This was challenging as there was quite a large group of people involved.
PW: As Todd mentioned, it was definitely not easy, but it was really a good experience, working with a great group of people.
MD: You have a training class this year at LISA “Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor”; can you briefly tell us what will this cover; also how is it different from your previous trainings at LISA?
TD: Me and Patrick presented first this material at USENIX’08, and this was at that time heavily based on the book, because the book itself is a hands-on guide for new users, for people that don’t have experience with Xen and we would basically take you from zero to running virtualization in your datacenter. This year we updated the content to the current times and extended it to the cloud technologies where people are using virtualization to run their public and private clouds, and many times a hybrid mode between them. Also we’ve added the Xen Cloud Platform that is also new; we’re still going from zero to virtualization, but this time we are going from zero to the cloud.
PW: Also, I would like to add that one of the neat things of this version of our class will bring in new technologies like the cloud computing, and this is relevant even for system administrators that have only a few machines (even if they don’t administer a cloud it is very valuable to understand it as consumers) but also for the enterprise administrators that use virtualization a lot even if they don’t use the term cloud, but will find platforms like Xen Cloud Platform very interesting.
MD: You guys also have a BOF: “Open Source and Open Standards-based Cloud Computing”. Can you talk about that a little?
TD: What is great about the BOF is that it will be an extension of our tutorial. This means that if you were in our session you will be in the right spot; if you haven’t, still you’re in a great spot because we are going to cover the basics for the Xen Cloud Platform again to make sure everyone is on the same page. Also we are going to have Ben Pfaff from Nicira Networks and he’s going to talk about Open vSwitch and what they are doing to take network virtualization to the next level; Jason Faulkner from Rackspace will talk about OpenStack and their efforts to create an open standards for cloud computing.
MD:You mentioned OpenStack; another similar project would be Eucalyptus. Such abstractions are built on top of the virtualization layer and hide many things to the administrator; is it still relevant to have a basic Xen understanding and knowledge?
TD: The main reason why we started teaching about Xen it was because it was difficult to setup and use, it wasn’t polished, it wasn’t quite user friendly; it was not the product it is today. Nowadays people spend less time getting it to work, and the focus is on different levels of the stack and using them, and we’ve updated our tutorial to take this into consideration. We still teach you all the things you need in case you have to debug it.
MD: We’ve seen a lot of traction related to KVM; many distros have switched to KVM instead of Xen. Why do you think that happened?
TD: The basic reason why KVM got popular quickly is because it is a simple Linux virtualization system that is integrated into the kernel itself. It relies on Linux and QEMU and it is not a stand-alone hypervisor. The reason why many Linux distributions currently have KVM support and not necessarily Xen support is that KVM is fully integrated in the mainline kernel (it comes with the Linux kernel). Xen domain0 support (Linux as the Xen management domain is in progress), but Xen (the hypervisor) is not intended to be included in Linux, but is a stand-alone hypervisor, which allows for various management domains to run on top of it (for example, Linux, Solaris, BSD). Linux distributions will (and many already are) starting to add Xen support back into the their standard distributions.
MD: You guys will be busy with a class and a BOF; I’m curious if you come to LISA just for teaching those, or if you stay around for other talks?
PW: I will be there for the whole week and will attend several different sessions. Actually I will be sticking around after LISA also for CHIMIT 2010, that will be located in the same area as this is a good opportunity to attend both conferences.
TD: Unfortunately myself, I will not be able to stay all the week, but I would have liked to been able to attend some of the many great talks, but I will not be able to do it this year.
MD: What other interesting things are you working on these days?
TD: I’m doing some interesting work these days in a consulting project, where we are taking their Xen deployment more into the cloud dynamic type of environment: hadoop clustering, Xen Cloud Platform, OpenStack, puppet are things that we are working on, setting up hybrid cloud deployments with public clouds like amazon, rackspace, and private clouds. I’m also working on a very interesting research project where we are trying to combine an organization’s mission space with cyber space. Finally, I’ve been spending more time helping the xen.org community and I will be taking on the role of Technology Evangelist for Citrix/Xen.org. We are also looking to hire a new community manager for xen.org.
PW: I’m looking into the usable security space, where human computer interaction meets security and actually I’m working with virtualization to segregate users applications into different privilege spaces and isolate various applications. Related to this I’m also hosting another BOF at the end of the week on Thursday “Human-Computer Interaction: Experiences and Difficulties in IT Management, Security, and Privacy” that should be interesting to meet and exchange ideas with different people in the usable security space.
I want to thank Todd and Patrick very much for their time. You can register for their class on Sunday at LISA’10 in San Jose, California.
Registration for LISA ‘10 is still open at http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/
