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I've never looked into the internals of Xen and I can't really answer your question, but with a Xen server on Servarica, everything feels unbearably slow. I heard they were starting to move to KVM which doesn't have the same issue. There also doesn't seem to be widespread support for Xen (CasaOS doesn't recognize the disk type). KVM just seems vastly more popular and AI probably reiterates that.
I was just thinking about XEN the other day while perusing thru some old hosting related bookmarks that was promoting it. I mean I'm not really in/or have ever been in the loop to be fair, but I didn't even think it was a thing anymore. I remember one of my first VPS was XEN and I thought I was some kind of cyber pimp for using it, without even know really wtf it was.
We used Xen about 10-15 years ago. It worked and generally had no big problems except one - it was not native to Linux software. Therefore, theoretically, it might have less productivity. However, we have not conducted tests to compare its productivity.
I don't have any clients that still use XEN, most migrated and use either KVM (Proxmox or Nutanix), Hyper V, or VMWARE. Managing XEN was a disaster, and performance in the real environment was worse, in my opinion.
We still offer XEN VMs, and I personally haven’t found any major drawbacks compared to KVM.
Hi,
short answer: no
longer answer: While Xen was THE alternative to vmware in the past, in the meanwhile KVM caught up in terms of flexibility, stability and features.
Nowadays Xen is, as far as i know, if ever, used in older deployments / because of compliance / compatibility reasons
I do not know a single product around the topic virtualization that features xen.
They use kvm, lxc, docker, podman, what ever, but not xen. At least i dont know any relevant.
How about EC2... I know it is not pure Xen and continues to evolve, but still, people should have known about it.
Xen was the OS answer to VMWare, indeed, and it does, now, lag behind KVM in terms of performance, but the differences are small and with today's machines are getting even smaller. Comparing one provider with another and saying this one is slower for using Xen is simply BS.
That being said, I was a big fan of the XenServer and then XCP, running it heavily in production and today I am using Proxmox. It's natural because KVM has a much better backing so it is normal to evolve faster and have more deployed and use cases available for testing and ironing out bugs/improving performance, better documentation, more and more stable features, etc.
For now, Xen is the niche, but it is good to always have it as an alternative, completely free and OS, never trust corporations with your daily use products. I mean, trust, but always be prepared to migrate to a solid alternative in case shit hits the fan. \
Just look at VMWare... remember VMWare Server? Free, then discontinued, ESXi, free, discontinued, free again (sorta), now workstation is free (again, sorta), it's just a huge mess. Xen never changed, only XenServer under Citrix had that problem, but we had the OS alternative almost all the time and the OS stack was always available, just didn't have the extra features out of the box, you needed to build them as required, lazy admins didn't like that...
To be more precise, I compared XCP-ng and KVM. But now see that XCP-ng heavily pivoted towards commercial end.
Speaking about AWS:
XCP(-ng) is to Xen what Proxmox is to KVM or ESXi is to VMWare, it's not the stack per se, but a fully- (more or less) featured server stack based on Xen/KVM/VMWare. You can't compare vanilla KVM with XCP or similar because they are not similar things. It's like comparing the pistons from an engine of a Subaru with a full Toyota.
Regarding XCP's move towards corporate support, that is natural, for as long as it remains fully OS, everyone stands to benefit, the advantage that promoted KVM so much was exactly the corporate support, Citrix was unable to fulfil this role, so has been ditched, more or less, by the community.
Proxmox has corporate support, KVM per se has corporate support, even bigger than Proxmox, the two technologies are both mature and well tested for a long time, there are some differences, including in performance, but, overall, I would conclude that you can do the task using any, today they are more like the linux kernel, that is the os, actually, but it means nothing without the userspace ecosystem, so, if we compare XCP with Proxmox, then Proxmox comes ahead, it has very advanced features, but if you wish to run a datacentre you can do so with both, Cloudstack, OpenStack support XenServer/XCP natively and OpenNebula moves in the same direction even as it needs an add-on in the stable version.
Which is best is debatable, for example, CloudStack supports Xen better, has more features with XenServer/XCP, there are many details, such as behaviours with pass-throughs, live resizing and migration, an expert admin feels these things and can recommend one or the other depending on user scenario, but, in general, in competent hands, they are equally good tools AND can be used in parallel, like we do with CloudStack, maintaining a Xen Zone in Italy and more KVM ones with the same integrator/orchestrator.
One more thing, mostly relevant to hobbysts/small enterprises with in-house deployments, XCP clusters are coming back faster and risk less data-loss in case of catastrophic events such as power-loss, Proxmox clusters have far more issues in such cases but, again, that is rarely a problem in a serious datacentre, more so at home or in a small deployment at a company or another.