Exclusive Q&A with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix & Founder of XenSource

Exclusive Q&A with Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix & Founder of XenSource
— ‘Virtualization is already widely used, but primarily for the first-order benefit, namely server consolidation,’ notes Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, in this Exclusive Q&A with Virtualization Journal. ‘The second-order benefits of agility, availability and manageability of the IT stack are now becoming better understood,’ Crosby continues, ‘and as a consequence virtualization has moved from a tactical tool for gaining immediate savings, to become a key strategic theme for every IT department.’

I think Mr. Crosby gives a great interview, but I have to disagree with some of this statements, like the one above “a key strategic theme for every IT department”.  It may be that in some, but the majority of IT shops and companies are still stuck in the tactical world and don’t know how to make the jump to that strategic level.  Mr. Crosby makes some statements in here that I find very interesting and I will be following closely:

Virtualization Journal: If paravirtualization equals second-generation virtualization, what will third-generation virtualization look like?

Simon Crosby: From a hypervisor architecture perspective, there is very little left to “optimize away” in the way that paravirtualization allows us to slim down the code base. What will happen is that all of the data center infrastructure, from CPUs to memory management, to I/O chipsets and even storage subsystems will become “virtualization aware” and assist with the job of speeding up what formerly had to be done either in the hypervisor or the virtualization stack that drives it.

Within the next year, I/O Virtualization (often called IOV) standardized by the PCI SIG will start to be supported by fabric and I/O card vendors. This allows optimized fast-path I/O between guests and hardware in a virtualization-safe manner, without needing to use the driver stack offered by the virtualization platform itself. This effectively removes most of the remaining overhead of virtualization. We recently demonstrated XenServer with a performance of about 10,000 iSCSI IOPS on a 10Gb/s IOV card from SolarFlare, for example. This means that the most challenging workloads can now be virtualized.

Catch the rest of the interview here.

Cheers

~ by c1tr1xguru on May 7, 2008.