LISA Insider: The Xen.org Team on Xen Training
A new Xen training course was offered at LISA this year in San Diego. Wenjin Hu and Zach Sheperd of Clarkson University delivered the training course. Hu and Sheperd both contributed to the official “Running Xen” book and are both actively involved in the Xen.org community project. The course was informative and provided attendees with the information they need to get started with Xen and was packed full with over 70 attendees.

Interview with the Xen Community Manager, Stephen Spector
Stephen’s commitment and enthusiasm for the Xen project are evident. His feelings seem to be shared by most of the people attending the training. When you talk to Stephen it becomes apparent why others get so fired up about the Xen project. According to Spector, due to the prevalence of the academics in general and computer science students in particular, LISA is a great venue for disseminating information and progressing the Xen.org project. According to Spector, given the collaborative nature of the educational community, academics are the best conduit for spreading the word about Xen.

“The Xen.org community is about building the best Hyperivisor”, says Spector. Judging by the number of attendees Xen is most certainly holding true to this vision, and the main purpose of Xen as described by Ian Pratt, creator of the Xen hypervisor. The Xen open source community is what fuels the success of the commercial Xen-based products; however, the reason they are successful is because of the open-source community’s contributions and feedback on the Xen project.

Up Close with the Xen Trainers: Wenjin Hu and Zach Sheperd
Hu believes that the reason for the extreme popularity of the course is due to the popularity of the Xen project on a large scale. People are starting to use it in production and as a better computing platform for their business technology infrastructure as well as University computing platforms. Hu and Sheperd both believe it is important to connect with the community to get feedback on use cases for the Xen hypervisor. Sheperd antes that “development fosters research”, and Xen provides the substrate for incubating software development projects, which is one of the many use cases for this virtualization platform.

Conclusions
Xen is a new course offered at the LISA training tracks and there will likely be intermediate and advanced courses at future LISA’s. One of the reasons the Xen team chose LISA to gather feedback about their training, disseminate information to the most relevant audience, and gather use cases about how Xen is being used. On the flipside, the conference attendees received an introduction to Xen and come away with the ability for use the Xen hypervisor for whatever projects thay may have dreamed up, and fast-tracks their ability to get the most out of Xen. There are many new great things coming down the line, stay tuned on the LISA blog and Xen.org for more information.

Further Information
Xen Community Website: http://www.xen.org
Xen Blog: http://blog.xen.org
Xen Mailing Lists: http://lists.xensource.com