It was the worst of times; it was the best of times. The opening paragraph to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities describes a world not unlike our own, and in the years I've been working with technology, never has a quote applied more to a product I'm working on. The start of 2013 was our winter of despair. This was the time of XenServer 6.1, and a release that was in desperate need of attention. Performance, stability and overall capabilities were frequently called into question in forums, Twitter and in blogs. Almost daily there were cries of pain and claims of plans to migrate from XenServer. While I know some did migrate, migration isn't exactly painless so we had a chance to recover; but we needed to do the right things starting with two huge items:
- Patch the product. It took a few months, but we finally got that right. As of the end of 2013 we're at patch 34, so it's not been an easy time, but XenDesktop customers can have every confidence a deployment on XenServer 6.1 as part of their product entitlement is a good choice.
- Improve performance. For years it was possible to purchase a server that had more capacity to run VMs than XenServer was capable of running. In an attempt to resolve this we developed cool new architectures like Windsor, but after doing some heavy-duty performance analysis it was determined bottlenecks did exist, and that they could be resolved. So resolve them we did, with the result being an ability to run hundreds of VMs per host in XenServer 6.2.
We also realized that in the cloud era our users are interested in being in control of their IT in the way they deploy, purchase and integrate their infrastructure so we moved XenServer to an open source development model. An announcement doesn't make for a viable open source project and I was officially given the mandate to manage the community and evangelize the technology. Since most people starting a new position take stalk of where things are, that's what I did and the results weren't pretty. I found we hadn't completed posting source code and minimal communication was occurring on the lists; and while we're not great at it, we're getting better. I beat the drum consistently within the XenServer development team that we need to be more transparent and accountable. I would love to say that we've fully transitioned to an open source and transparent model, but still need to improve as we get more comfortable with an open development model for XenServer.
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