Day One: SouthEast LinuxFest

Day 1 of the SouthEast LinuxFest is over and I thought the community might like a recap of today’s activities:

• Presented the Xen.org history, mission, various technologies, and ways to join our effort to a filled room of about 115 people ; there were a number of good questions from the audience on the KVM announcement from Red Hat, hardware requirements for full-virtualization, and performance comparisons on various virtualization platforms
• Opportunity to introduce our new mascot, To Be Named Later, to the GNU folks for addition in future open source materials they create
• Discussed ways for people to become automated test labs for Xen release candidates; expect to see some  equipment available for the community to leverage in a new automated test methodology that some community members are working on
• Helped people understand the Invisible Things Labs testing of Xen and how we work with them to find and  solve security holes they find during their extensive security testing of Xen; NOTE – this became an issue as Red Hat presented that Xen was no longer a viable hypervisor solution due to the Invisible Things Lab testing. Based on the presentation I saw, this is the only reason customers need to drop Xen; I guess not understanding how the Xen.org community works with Invisible Things Lab’s might make them unaware of the benefit of this testing

Overall, this a a nice 250 to 400 people (estimated) sized event with many people interested in Xen, virtualization, and how our community works. There is a great deal of FUD in the open source community about Xen from Red Hat’s public comments and meeting with the community directly gives us a chance to clarify our project mission, purpose in enterprise computing, and market success. I am disappointed that in the 2 Red Hat presentations I saw today they choose to directly attack Xen with FUD instead of being supportive of our community and how our two open source projects together enable a competitive open source presence in the virtualization market. It is my belief that all open source projects should work together to drive open source solutions as a viable consumer solution versus common proprietary solutions. In fact, Max Spehvack from Red Hat in his keynote today (paraphrasing) said that open source companies should support a leading open source project and join in the effort instead of attacking with a new open source effort as it only diminishes the overall success of open source.  It’s a shame that Red Hat is not following his lead in the virtualization space.