Community Member Spotlight

Current Position - IT Manager at WorldWeb Internet Hosting

Xen Involvement - I am a Linux user since 1996 when I got involved directly with Internet Service Providers. Since then I have been studying, watching and even contributing to the evolution of Linux and its universe. I always had an interest in virtualization and in the emulation of different architectures on the PC, for example, snes9x, qemu, vmware server, openvz, UML, etc... In 2006, I discovered the Xen virtualization technology and was very impressed with the paravirtualization technique. Since then, I have not directly installed Linux on my physical servers; instead, Xen is always present, even on the simplest hardware because of paravirtualization that brings to us a VM that is as fast as bare-metal Linux. I believe there is no reason to not install Xen at all.

Today, I am the maintainer of the Xen Live CD and I hope that my work contributes to users success with their Xen implementation.

Thoughts on Xen - The Xen architecture is the most well thought-out virtualization technique on the market. There is simply no rival to the Xen currently. KVM is very good, no doubt, but is totally dependent on the CPU with virtualization support built-in. Xen can operate on a wide variety of architectures as well as older CPUS, without supporting full virtualization. What attracted me the most to Xen, is the ability it gives to administrators for better hardware sizing, dramatically reducing the emission of greenhouse gases by reducing energy consumption and as a direct consequence, reducing the effects of global warming. In Brazil, for example, we see many companies, including the government and military, installing expensive servers to host only one Bind9 with a few domains! It is a BIG waste! And Xen has come to end this waste of computer resources. In my company, we reduced one hundred servers with Linux by a factor of ten with Xen! Imagine the amount of electricity that's not being consumed anymore. Our business continues to function normally and now with full high-availability among other new features provided by mechanisms of Xen itself.

Xen.org Team

Ian Pratt	Keir Fraser	Stephen Spector	Jean Guyader	Dave Scott
Isaku Yamahata	Thiago Martins