XAPI

Open source software to build private and public clouds

Note that we never really had a clear name for the XAPI project. The project was initially named after the Xen Cloud Platform, which is essentially a distribution of the Hypervisor, the XAPI toolstack and various other components. Later, the project also delivered packages into Linux distributions. This has created some confusion in the community! To make this clearer, the project team proposes to name the project after the XAPI toolstack. In other words, the project would be named after the codebase instead of one deliverable that the project produces.

What is the XAPI Project?

The XAPI project is a sub-project (or team) of the Xen Project that develops the enterprise ready XAPI toolstack. Xen used with the XAPI toolstack consolidates server workloads, enables savings in power, cooling, and management costs and thus contributing to environmentally sustainable computing, an increased ability to adapt to ever-changing IT environments, an optimized use of existing hardware, and an improved level of IT reliability.

The XAPI toolstack contains additional functionality over other Xen Project toolstacks:

  • VM lifecycle: live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
  • Resource pools: flexible storage and networking
  • Event tracking: progress, notification
  • Upgrade and patching capabilities
  • Real-time performance monitoring and alerting
  • Built-in support and templates for Windows and Linux guests
  • Open vSwitch support built-in Storage XenMotion® live Migration (cross-pool migration, VDI migration)
  • Integrations for cloud, storage and networking solutions.

The XAPI team also develops tooling, agents and libraries that are needed to operate a XAPI based system.

License

XAPI is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL2).

Getting XAPI

The XAPI team delivers XAPI in two different forms: as Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), which is an out-of-the box installable ISO and as packages that are delivered via Linux distributions.

Xen Cloud Platform

The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) is an ISO that installs onto your host, providing a complete enterprise-ready out-of-the-box server virtualization and cloud computing platform after install. It contains CentOS 5.7 (Linux kernel v2.6.32.43), Xen 4.1.3, XAPI, Open vSwitch and 1.4.2 other components. For a complete list of features see the XCP Feature List. XCP can be downloaded from xenproject.org.

XAPI Linux Packages

XAPI packages enable you to build an XCP-like environment from packages that are distributed via your host operating system's package manager. XAPI packages are only available from supported Linux distributions (currently Debian and Ubuntu). Using XAPI packages provides more flexibility in tailoring your environment to your needs, but comes at the cost of less functionality and a more complex set-up. For more information see XCP-XAPI for Debian based distributions .

 

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