How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix
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I will gently tease @olivierlambert by noting that the article says Citrix underestimated the importance of homelab users - as The Register paraphrases :
"However, this hit one particular sub-community of free users that one engineer Headland interviewed called the "weird systems users": hobbyists who offer virtualization to non-profit and charity users, using old, out-of-maintenance hardware that had been inherited or passed on to them. Enthusiast users, with no funds to buy licenses, but who had been among the most important finders and fixers of bugs. Unable to use the free version any more, they were forced to move to other products … or create them."
I know and accept that the priority must always be production-style hardware and the objective with xcp-ng will never be Proxmox-esque coverage of nearly all x86 hardware that runs Debian. But I do hope the homelabbers like @Andrew and @abufrejoval get some love too for helping xcp-ng keep up with emerging hardware (like the latest NUCs and similar Project TinyMiniMicro systems), and I for one am immensely grateful for that work - and by extension of course Vates for being willing and flexible to allow it to be added to xcp-ng. The product is all the richer for that.
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That's clearly a difference between Citrix and Vates: knowing the value of our community
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Lot of assumptions in that The Register write up.
Hobbyists not wanting to pay for licences, running on old hardware, supporting charities, etc. (Paraphrased)
The reality is that any "hobbyist" playing with this kind of tech, it's really a hobbyist. I'm not sure I would class anyone playing with this kind of technology a hobbyist, this suggests a lack of professionalism towards these technologies.
Let's be honest, 95% of people playing with this tech are going to be in some fairly high end jobs and/or high end IT consultancy. No-one has a hobby to use Type 1 Hypervisors, server grade hardware (brand new OR second hand) and commercial grade networking infrastructure required as a baseline to get this set up.
Many people in the IT world have probably never even heard of the concept of a Type 1 Hypervisor, let alone want to get into this well-known "Hobby".
The majority of the community contribute to progress their own understanding from a professional perspective and to pay it forward to support those who are chomping at their heels.
The reality is that for most big corporate enterprise companies (Citrix and many others) is that they often go down the route of providing £x,xxx training courses to learn their tech and expecting organisations to pay for this. Many organisations don't invest heavily in their staff through corporate training programmes. So people are left to find these things out on their own time in many cases.
No individual outside of the corporate working world is going to pay this level of investment for a course that, in my experience (not related to Citrix specifically), often provides little added value beyond a few Google searches, a ton of questions in the community and a watching a few YouTube videos.
There is a big difference in a community of professionals and a community of hobbyists.
If anything, that write up just shows how little they still understand about the community.
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@MichaelCropper I think that (to be fair to Citrix, or Cloud as they seem to be called now) they do acknowledge that not engaging better with the "enthusiast" community did hurt them. I first met Sheng Liang when he was CTO there before he went off to found Rancher and now Acorn Labs; he was so developer focused and you see that in everything he did afterwards. Perhaps that was why he left Citrix, thinking about it?
I agree for the most part with what you say about homelab enthusiasts, with the caveat that if you go on r/homelab you'll find people running a rack full of servers for their Plex environment and suchlike silliness. But yeah, most of us are doing this for work reasons and to learn new things so I hope we continue to be indulged a bit by the xcp-ng team - even though we're not their main focus.
I do worry though that it seems like Xen needs a forklift upgrade in a number of areas - kernel, Linux distribution, the storage and networking subsystems, for starters - and that's a tough ask for a relatively small project that also needs to make money along the way. In that context the "professional homelabber" community helps less because typically we ask for more features and provide testing, rather than actually writing large pieces of code.
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Clearly: the community is enjoying the product for free and will contribute directly or indirectly with feedback (tests and features). There's a cost to maintain the community, but it's a great thing in the long run. At least, that's our core DNA here and it's part of why we love to do open source
However, the community will never pay for it: that's OK as long as you can maintain and grow revenue with corporate customers.
Our "revenue" challenge is two fold:
- converting enough business to XCP-ng/XO
- making them pay for support
In the meantime, we invest a LOT of efforts (like even more than 100% of our revenue thanks to some grants) to improve our product, which is vastly different than the Citrix approach, where you have big pension funds behind, requiring 30% margin just for them.
I hope we'll continue to grow fast enough to match the technical challenges (indeed, there's a lot to do, but if you are optimistic you can see what's already done on upstream, which is huge compare to only 2y ago).
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@parallax said in How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix:
I know and accept that the priority must always be production-style hardware and the objective with xcp-ng will never be Proxmox-esque coverage of nearly all x86 hardware that runs Debian. But I do hope the homelabbers like @Andrew and @abufrejoval get some love too for helping xcp-ng keep up with emerging hardware (like the latest NUCs and similar Project TinyMiniMicro systems), and I for one am immensely grateful for that work - and by extension of course Vates for being willing and flexible to allow it to be added to xcp-ng. The product is all the richer for that.
It's already the case, isn't it? (I mean: on the get some love too part :))
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I haven't watched the talk, but it seems to me the title of the article is just wrong. Should be "How Citrix didn't understand how to engage the opensource community... According to Citrix."
Regarding Xen, yes, their committment to the upstream Xen project has reduced in the past years but 1. it still significant (Today, they still have employees whose work is mainly upstream work in the Xen Project), 2. this is not what the article is about, at all.
The contents itself is interesting, but many people will just see the title.
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@stormi said in How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix:
It's already the case, isn't it? (I mean: on the get some love too part :))
Well, I can't speak on their behalf, but I hope so, certainly.
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@stormi said in How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix:
Regarding Xen, yes, their committment to the upstream Xen project has reduced in the past years but 1. it still significant (Today, they still have employees whose work is mainly upstream work in the Xen Project), 2. this is not what the article is about, at all.
I guess you've seen the cloud.com launch for the newly merged entity? I have referred to it elsewhere as "tying several bricks together to make a raft," and usually takeovers by PE firms do not go well in general. At work we have over a thousand Citrix ADCs so we're following this closely; meanwhile we are also dealing with the remains of McAfee (now Skyhigh) where the changes have been extremely negative; and before that the clamour of activist investors at Juniper wanting more money in their pockets basically killed that once-great company, and we have had to change the vendor for our entire global network (994 sites) in just two years.
So I would say - hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
The contents itself is interesting, but many people will just see the title.
Alas, welcome to 2022 where everything relies on eye-catching headlines to provoke controversy, and no one looks at issues in depth any more or from more than one side.
Yes, I am officially old and cranky now.
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We have a bit more information than we say here, because it's not public. Be certain that we are very aware on what's going on at Citrix/Tibco
We are always transparent regarding Vates, but we can't do the same for a company which isn't ours
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@olivierlambert said in How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix:
We are always transparent regarding Vates, but we can't do the same for a company which isn't ours
Yet.
This whole Cloud.com experiment could go belly up. -
@MichaelCropper I don't think that's entirely fair-there are plenty of homelabbers that purely do it as a personal side project, even if few of them end up on xcp-ng.
I mean, I'm certainly one of them.
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So as everyone could spot, XenServer is now a dedicated business unit inside Cloud Software Group. Funnily enough, they are back with the old name, and are more independent.
IMHO, that's good news, and we hope to continue to develop our partnership with them!
