Community Projects

Here are some active projects within the Xen Community looking for participation (feel free to email stephen.spector@xen.org if you want your project added to this list):

• Definition:ConVirt is a centralized management solution that lets you provision, monitor and manage the complete lifecycle of your Xen deployments.
• Links:Project Home - Team Blog - Project Wiki
• ConVirt provides enterprise-class management for open source virtualization platforms, making fully open source virtualization an extremely viable and cost-effective choice for enterprises. ConVirt lets you manage the complete lifecycle of Xen from a central, GUI dashboard. With ConVirt's sophisticated template-based provisioning, centralized monitoring, configuration management and administration features, IT administrators can automate the entire virtual machine lifecycle on open source platforms with ease.

• Definition: A management console written in Python via the TurboGears framework. All communications with Xen dom0's is performed via the XenAPI.The dashboard is dynamically populated via AJAX, on a dom0 by dom0 case basis.
• Links: Product Screenshots

• Definition: A graphical managemement system for Xen virtual environments.
• Links: Product Screenshots and Information

• Definition:OpenNebula is an open source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources.
• Links: Project Home Page

• Definition: The VHPCE core concept and component is virtual cluster, the management unit is virtual cluster or virtual node instead of physical node. Features includes customizing virtual cluster, monitor virtual cluster, cluster template and the amigo file system for CAS-style storage virtual cluster cross cluster.
• Links: Project Website

• Definition: Nimbus is a set of open source tools that together provide an "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS) cloud computing solution. Our mission is to evolve the infrastructure with emphasis on the needs of science, but many non-scientific use cases are supported as well. Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.
• Links:Project Home Page

• Definition: Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters.
• Links: Project Home Page

• Definition:Isolated Execution is a software reference implementation of the security through isolation concept.
• Links: Project Home

• Definition: When running multiple domains (or virtual machines) using the Xen hypervisor, this library will allow a privileged domain to view the runtime state of another domain. This technique is known as virtual machine introspection. The current software focuses on memory access, but also provides proof-of-concept code for disk monitoring.
• Links: Latest Source Code - Google Group

• Definition: Virutal machine sychronization for fault tolerance
• Links: Abstract - Xen Summit Boston 2008 Presentation - Video (368 MB) - Demo (11 MB)

• Definition:Ganeti is a tool for the management of Virtualization clusters. It offers very easy management of systems with multiple virtualization servers and deployment of instances on these. It includes user transparent setup of mirrored disks for these nodes with DRBD, running commands on all cluster nodes and distributing files on the whole cluster.
• Links:Latest Source Code

• Definition: High Availability and Disaster Tolerance
• Links: SecondSite Project Home Page
• The SecondSite project is exploring applications of virtualization in order to make existing computer software highly available and disaster tolerant. Using a highly optimized form of live migration, we continuously replicate the memory image of a running virtual machine onto a second physical computer. In the case of failure, this second computer can seamlessly continue execution so fast that open network connections remain functional. The major benefit of this approach is that applications and operating systems don't have to be modified in order to benefit from HA -- this sourse of complexity has been a major limitation in providing HA and DR in existing systems.

• Definition:Expand and complete the OVF requirements
• Links: Open-source library and tools to support OVF - Mike Day Xen Summit Boston Slides

• Definition: Xen port to the ARM Processor
• Links: Xen ARM Wiki - Mailing List Xen Summit Boston 2008 Source Code Release Slides

• Definition: Xen port on ARM for embedded hard/soft realtime applications
• Links: Embedded Xen Sourceforge - Mailing List
• The EmbeddedXEN project aims at providing ARM developers a single multi-kernel binary image including XEN, Linux, miniOS and Xenomai RT extension devoted to embedded systems. Isolation and virtualization mechanisms fully relied on the XEN hypervisor and virtual & physical memory layouts are adapted accordingly

• Definition:Rapid virutal machine creation and state capture
• Links: Parallax Project Home Page
• Conventional provisioning of virtual machines is hampered by the need to create and populate volumes of storage. A more flexible storage system is needed to support rapid virtual machine creation and state capture. Parallax works by taking a single, cluster-available volume of storage and accessing it though a block management layer. Our block management layer is organized as a radix tree that enables dynamic block remapping. We support read-only sharing of blocks, which are protected with copy-on-write. Through this mechanism, Parallax can perform very low overhead snapshots, and can quickly provision new volumes based on template images.

• Definition: Snowflock is our prototype implementation of the Impromptu Cluster (IC) abstraction. In an IC, an application encapsulated inside a virtual machine (VM) is swiftly forked into multiple copies that execute on different physical hosts, and then disappear when the computation ends. ICs simplify the development of parallel applications and reduces management burden by enabling the instantiation of new stateful computing elements: workers that need no setup time because they have a memory of the application state achieved up to the point of forking. This approach combines the benefits of cluster-based parallelism with those of running inside a VM.
• Links:Project Homepage - Project Slides - Xen Summit Boston 2008 Video (410 MB)

• Definition: Case studies of Xen from every continent. Help show the world that Xen is running everywhere. Prize to anyone who can find Xen running in Antarctica
• Links:Google Map - Xen Case Studies