Tarry pointed me to Desperately Seeking Xen, Jeff Gould is wondering about the adoption of Xen.
But what I'd really like to know is - who's actually using this stuff in production? And I mean actual end-user organizations, not ISPs or hosters. Based on the absence of Xen-related chatter, my guess is that production users of Xen are still few and far between.
I think he isn't even looking. or definitely looking at the wrong places,
Well.. if he is a Director at a Research company .. he should know better than to look for
Press releases and Customer reviews. Jeff, welcome to 2007 this is the Open Source decade. People don't buy products anymore.. people don't run to their vendors and ask for a rebate in return for a fake case study. People just use the technologies available freely.
You have to compare the adoption of any new open source technology to the adoption of Linux and open source in general. Did you see press releases in the early years from big vendors touting they were doing implementations ? No those only came a couple of years later but the adoption was there.. One day .. Apache clearly overtook IIS, but how many vendors were sending out press releases about their Apache successes ?
So you are looking at sales from Xensource and info from Novell and RedHat customers talking about how they use Xen. Please stop looking.
You won't find any stories from Ubuntu or CentOS users on how they use Postfix as a core component in their network either.
I don't doubt that hundreds or perhaps even thousands of Linux geeks around the world are kicking the tires of Xen, especially those using the free distributions that include it, like Fedora. But that doesn't make Xen a serious threat to its rivals in actual deployment in real-world data centers, at least not yet. By any measure, VMware is still the 8,000 pound gorilla in this market.
This is where you go wrong.. you don't know what they are using it for. They might be using Xen in a production environment at a huge bank or telco, not telling you because they are perfectly happy with the way it is running. Nobody will ever see a dime (apart from the guys paycheck) for having implemented 200 CentOS based Xen servers. But they are there (trust me I know they are there..) and both VMWare and XenSource are loosing business there, altough probably not the business they want.
Are these deployments showing up in any sales figures ready to compare the "sales" of Xen vs the sales of VMWare ? No , and they never will
For those who believe that Xen will one day overtake VMware, these numbers set the bar pretty high. For the moment, there is nothing to suggest that Xen is achieving anywhere near the growth rate it would need to perform such a feat, even in the distant future. Of course, all great things start out small, and there is still plenty of time for Xen, since we are by all indications only at the beginning of the great virtualization wave.
So you have no valid benchmark to see how fast the adoption of Xen is growing compared to the growth in market for VMWare.
Personally I think the end of the virtuallisation wave can be really close. It's only a matter of time till a hardware vendor decides to put a Hypervisor in his firmware, oops ..
lemme rephrase.. till a mainstream hardware vendor decides. Looking at the industry they are probably being told to hold of by the current players in the virtualisation market because they are still selling soon to be invisible technologies.
As for the different new open source virtualisation technologies , they will all fall in the right place. KVM has other features than Xen, more targeted towards a Desktop audience rather than a server audience. It's not like you are still supporting your soundcard and running X on every server you deploy .. so different tools for different purposes.
But I keep wondering .. if for every article written by someone outside the community claiming there is no use of a certain echnology I got a penny.. would I'd still care about them ?
PS. Reference studies for Xen deployments on demand :)
