Bringing modern virtualization in the Arm-powered Datacenter
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(sorry I'm catching up being late posting our news here)
We are thrilled to announce the start of a technical collaboration project between Vates, the creator of the innovative open-source virtualization stack XCP-ng & Xen Orchestra, and Ampere Computing, pioneer in energy-efficient & high performance arm-based processors.
https://vates.tech/blog/bringing-modern-virtualization-in-the-arm-powered-datacenter/
Feel free to react or ask questions!
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@olivierlambert compatibility with x86 VM?
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What do you mean?
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@olivierlambert I assume that @lawrence888 is asking for x86 guest OS support for VM and probably not only for Linux distros that support ARM (like Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Rocky, ...) but also for Windows Server as a guest OS? There is some ARM support for Windows 11 Pro as far as I know.
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@gskger Running Debian server on a Hexner Ampere machine and one has to install the ARM version. Not x86.
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If you are running an Arm server, you will need to run Arm guests obviously
I'm not expecting (at least now) an emulation layer whatsoever. That could be a good project for a company doing few hundreds millions in revenue though 
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@manilx True. Adapting XCP-ng for Arm64 will still open up many possibilities for managing cloud native environments or environments that need to scale BIG. Maybe one day Windows on ARM will be a thing. In the meantime have a look at Jeff Gerlings blog post on running Windows on Altere Altra Max.
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@gskger XCP-NG on ARM/Ampere will be huge!!!!
The running cost of those machines is a big win over x86. Power is expensive in Europe. Hetzner is in full swing on that front.
And not everything runs in Windows
I guess it's only the smaller fraction of all the VM's in the world. -
Do we have first release for Arm processor?
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Hi,
No, it's in the backlog. The CPU works with Xen, but adapting the entire toolstack requires first a new platform, which is the goal of XCP-ng 9.0, so don't expect anything this year
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Thanks @olivierlambert,
Hope we have new one in Q1 2025.
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I think you don't get it. Getting the whole stack ported on Arm is a huge amount of work and FIRST we need to have XCP-ng 9.0 (or at least a prototype of it). We are talking years of work (depending on how many people working on it).
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@olivierlambert thanks for investing in this. Great news!
