# Whatever happened to Xen?



## raindog308 (Jan 31, 2014)

It's all but vanished from the vps market, but big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) use it.


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## Nett (Jan 31, 2014)

Because the market is filled with oversold OVZ boxes.


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## maounique (Jan 31, 2014)

It is alive and well, thank you for asking !

Prometeus just launched XenPower and was a smashing success even tho it is Xen-PV and we get tons of questions if windows ISOs are available...

I am sure the 4.4 version of it will also be a smashing hit, I just hope it gets available for commercial implementations sooner rather than later. I will be pushing for it, you can bet on that.


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## TruvisT (Jan 31, 2014)

We still use XEN


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## kaniini (Jan 31, 2014)

All of our virtualization stuff is based on Xen...


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## tchen (Jan 31, 2014)

Mao_Member_no_signature said:


> It is alive and well, thank you for asking !
> 
> Prometeus just launched XenPower and was a smashing success even tho it is Xen-PV and we get tons of questions if windows ISOs are available...
> 
> I am sure the 4.4 version of it will also be a smashing hit, I just hope it gets available for commercial implementations sooner rather than later. I will be pushing for it, you can bet on that.


I'm actually surprised you didn't use Cloudstack with XCP.  Any reason for using KVM instead there?


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## maounique (Jan 31, 2014)

tchen said:


> I'm actually surprised you didn't use Cloudstack with XCP.  Any reason for using KVM instead there?


As you know XCP is discontinued since Citrix released the full version. 

I wanted to use Xen as it allows for both HVM and PV bt there were issues with this mixed environment and without it KVM was easier to do. At that time we were already late and needed something to work as fast as possible, after a few tests KVM worked with the billing module uncle wrote much easier too, so, that was it. It is more a matter of circumstances than choice.

However, we are now waiting for Xen 4.4 and will strive to implement such a zone but always have to consider the cost/opportunity ratio. If it is really stellar and performance is top notch, we will do it, if it is just marginal, then we may still do it, but perhaps later.

My fear is it will grow too much and turning back the Leviathan might be more work than worth it. Already balancing load between volumes in the SAN when we upgraded it took days, it has grown pretty fast. I hope 4.4 is ready soon, mostly for this reason.


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## Magiobiwan (Jan 31, 2014)

BlueVM runs Xen for our slabbed nodes we put small plans on. It works extremely well for our purposes. Xen-PV if you're wondering. It's less useful I think compared to OpenVZ and KVM for VPSes when it comes to features/price.


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## MannDude (Feb 1, 2014)

Good topic.

Glad to see people still rocking Xen. It does seem to have taken the backseat when compared to KVM though. I've not played with a Xen VPS in forever... Now I want to order one.


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## jenok (Feb 1, 2014)

I am still offering xen and felt more comfortable, even my new taiwan location vps offer with xen.


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## mikho (Feb 1, 2014)

Inception does both HVM and PV.


Guess the providers who offer openVZ or KVM does have a louder voice both here and on LE*


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## maounique (Feb 1, 2014)

MannDude said:


> Good topic.
> 
> Glad to see people still rocking Xen. It does seem to have taken the backseat when compared to KVM though. I've not played with a Xen VPS in forever... Now I want to order one.


We were looking to replace OVZ plans (OVerZold) and the logical choice with low overhead was Xen-PV:

XP4G - _12.68 Eur a month_

 

6 vCPU
4GB RAM
500GB Disk space
6000GB Traffic included
Compared to OverZold 8G it has MUCH more disk, 50 % more CPU, 3 times more traffic, but half the memory. Price is 10 GBP for overzold 8G, slightly less, but I think this is a very good deal, even compared with OVerZold, which is OVZ.


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## DomainBop (Feb 1, 2014)

MannDude said:


> Good topic.
> 
> Glad to see people still rocking Xen. It does seem to have taken the backseat when compared to KVM though. I've not played with a Xen VPS in forever... Now I want to order one.


Maybe it's taken a back seat in the follow the leader land of small LET providers (and in the land of Digital Ocean and its bastardized version of KVM), but it is still very much alive elsewhere.  My 2 favorite cloud providers use it (CloudVPS and HostVirtual), and in the past month two long established providers have launched discount Xen brands: XenPower from Prometeus which Mao mentioned, and UltraVPS.eu from ProviderService (not to be confused with UltraVPS.com which is owned by Versaweb) .  The prices on the UltaVPS.eu site are VAT inclusive so subtract the 19% VAT if you're outside the EU and you can have a 512MB Xen VPS for 1.68 euros monthly/ 1GB for 2.52 euros/ 2GB for 5.04 euros/ 4GB 10.08 euros.

FreeBSD 10 has greatly improved its support for Xen too.

...and then there are those tiny companies like Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc. whose platforms run on Xen


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## maounique (Feb 1, 2014)

As a Xen fan, I am happy it is thriving. It is stable, proven and the staple of experienced admins. I really hope 4.4 will force many people to ditch KVM, but KVM is not bad per se.

From the marketing point of view, people which need enterprise-like features prefer Xen the LE* crowd is kneeling to KVM (because many providers have Windows ISOs, maybe) so Xen is mandatory for hosts which appeal to more educated audiences, of course, if they think their offer will have any chance with that kind of much more knowledgeable crowd.


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## rchurch (Feb 1, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> Maybe it's taken a back seat in the follow the leader land of small LET providers (and in the land of Digital Ocean and its bastardized version of KVM), but it is still very much alive elsewhere.  My 2 favorite cloud providers use it (CloudVPS and HostVirtual), and in the past month two long established providers have launched discount Xen brands: XenPower from Prometeus which Mao mentioned, and UltraVPS.eu from ProviderService (not to be confused with UltraVPS.com which is owned by Versaweb) .  The prices on the UltaVPS.eu site are VAT inclusive so subtract the 19% VAT if you're outside the EU and you can have a 512MB Xen VPS for 1.68 euros monthly/ 1GB for 2.52 euros/ 2GB for 5.04 euros/ 4GB 10.08 euros.
> 
> FreeBSD 10 has greatly improved its support for Xen too.
> 
> ...and then there are those tiny companies like Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc. whose platforms run on Xen


How long has UltraXPS been operating?


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## AuroraZero (Feb 1, 2014)

Thinking about using it on my new project. I am sure it is going to work better then KVM will. Just waiting for the dedi deployment so I can get started on the installs and testing. Will be interesting to see if this works out like I want it to or not.


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## raindog308 (Feb 1, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> ...and then there are those tiny companies like Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc. whose platforms run on Xen


True, though for AWS, Azure, etc. you can't really compare them to the rest of the market.  They have the engineering staff to dive into the Xen code and customize it.  Most VPS providers (even big ones like Linode) do not have the resources to do that.

It's sort of like a presentation I attended where a Facebook guy explained how they use MySQL.  It was interesting but practically, a waste of time - Facebook rewrites parts of MySQL to suit its needs which is not something me/my employer/most companies are going to do.


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## PwnyExpress (Feb 2, 2014)

raindog308 said:


> It's all but vanished from the vps market, but big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc) use it.


Azure doesn't use Xen, they use Hyper-V


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## KuJoe (Feb 2, 2014)

I used to be a Xen fanboy back in the day, then I started having to manage nodes and OpenVZ won my heart. Even as an end-user I prefer OpenVZ over Xen or KVM.


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## kaniini (Feb 2, 2014)

MannDude said:


> Good topic.
> 
> Glad to see people still rocking Xen. It does seem to have taken the backseat when compared to KVM though. I've not played with a Xen VPS in forever... Now I want to order one.


Your VPS with me is Xen...?


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## web-project (Feb 9, 2014)

Net said:


> Because the market is filled with oversold OVZ boxes.


more popular as some providers can easy oversell, put 1000 accounts per node


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## BrianHarrison (Feb 11, 2014)

We offer Xen PV and HVM. All of my own personal VMs run Xen PV -- can't beat the performance and isolation combo.


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## bdtech (Feb 15, 2014)

Seems to be working out pretty well for Linode


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