On 10/05/2011 06:16 PM, Ed Heron wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2011-10-05 at 10:55 -0400, Rich wrote:
>> Since the Xen and Linux kernel people have finally made peace and Xen
>> is going to be included with the kernel, should I keep using the Xen
>> virtual server with Centos or should I switch to KVM?  I am running
>> Centos 5.7 now.
>> I guess the real question is can I still use Xen with Centos 6?
>
>    The support end of life for CentOS 5 is listed as March 31, 2014
> (http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-fe8a0be91ee3e7dea812e8694491e1dde5b75e6d).  There isn't any pressure, at this point, to convert your VM hosts to CentOS 6 unless there is some feature you require.
>
>    I doubt RH will add XEN support to RHEL 6.  They don't like to add
> functionality to an existing product.  We can hope they bring XEN back
> in RHEL 7.

While Xen will probably return in RHEL 7 simply because it is part of the
upstream kernel now I doubt it will be officially supported by Red Hat.
Between buying Qumranet (http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/) and now
Gluster (https://www.redhat.com/promo/storage/) it is clear that Red Hat
aims to become a provider of a complete independent virtualization stack
and is unlikely to support "competing" products directly.

The question is what does Xen offer that KVM cannot provide? Looking at the
slides of the KVM Forum 2011 (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KVM_Forum_2011)
there seem to be many interesting improvements in the pipeline so at some
point the question really is why hold on to Xen at all when there is not
real reason to?