Red Hat works to solidify Xen interface
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SAN FRANCISCO--In an effort to make the Xen more useful to computer administrators, Red Hat is working to stabilize the application programming interfaces (APIs) that control the virtualization software. Having fixed APIs will mean higher-level management software can automate various Xen tasks, said Brian Stevens, Red Hat's chief technology officer, in an interview at a news conference here.
Red Hat plans to release its first Xen APIs in the next month or two, Stevens said. The company hopes to stabilize as much as possible before the debut of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 product by the end of the year.
The API work is part of Red Hat's effort to make virtualization a standard part of the mainstream x86 server market, which the company and others argues will improve server efficiency and lower operating costs. Xen lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously, sharing the same hardware and using it closer to its top capacity than is typically the case for stand-alone servers.
The first set of APIs will cover how virtual machines are started, stopped and moved from one physical computer to another, Stevens said. A second set will manage resources such as a virtual machine's processing power, memory or input-output capacity. And a third will deal with control policies--for example, setting limits on hardware resources, changing virtual machine behavior so top priorities are met, or automating changes based on what time of day it is.
VMware, an EMC subsidiary that leads the virtual machine market for x86 servers, has offered its own APIs for some of these tasks, but Red Hat wasn't interested, Stevens said.
"We looked at them," he said, but the "10,000-line specification" was too bulky. "I think you can hit 80 percent of use cases with 20 percent of the code. Plus we want to start simplistic and let the APIs evolve."