Choice of Toolstacks

One really great feature of Xen is that there are several choices of toolstacks that can be used to manage it. Before the introduction of libxenlight, there was a complicated and inefficient toolstack situation. The issue was that xend, xapi, libvirt, etc. all needed to manage many common low-level operations, which led to code duplication, inefficiences, bugs, and wasted effort (e.g fixing the same bug in all of the toolstacks). Further, the default toolstack at the time (xend) was difficult to understand, modify, and extend.

Each toolstack exposes an API, which will run different tools. The figure below gives a very brief overview over the choices you have, which commercial products use which stack and examples of hosting vendors using specific APIs.

Libxenlight (libxl)

Libxenlight is a small lower-level library, written in C. It is simple to understand; and easy to modify, and extend. Libxl is (or will be) shared by all Xen toolstacks. It was created to provide a simple and robust API for all the toolstacks to use (instead all of the toolstacks each implementing this common functionality). It was also created to be a common codebase to do Xen operations.

libxl Design Principles

• Implement mechanisms, not policies
• Stateless
• Hide xenstore, libxenctrl, and libxenguest from higher levels
• Be as simple as possible

Also see

• Man Pages (including pages for XL)
• Libxl improvements (in Xen 4.2)
• Stefano's libxenlight [video] and [slides] at Xen Summit NA 2010.

Choice of Toolstacks

This section describes the various toolstacks (and the console that is used to run it).

Default / XL

xl is a lightweight command line toolstack built using libxenlight. xl is shipped along with Xen and is the default toolstack for Xen as of Xen 4.1.

xl was designed to be backwards compatible with the xm CLI for xend.

Also see:

• XL
• XL vs Xend Feature Comparison
• Open source projects interfacing/using the default stack
• Commercial products interfacing/using the default stack
• Xen Management Tools - Duplicates some of the info above

XAPI / XE

The Xen management API (xapi) is the default toolstack for XenServer and XCP. XAPI is fully open source and has been ported to Linux distributions (see XAPI toolstack on Debian-based distributions). At the time of this writing, work is in progress to port XAPI to use libxenlight and other distros. For more information see the XAPI source code, the the XAPI mailing list, or the IRC channel (#xen-api on Freenode).

Also see:

• Why XAPI? discussion section includes comparison to libvirt
• Nuts and Bolts from Steven Maresca (not only why XAPI, but how to use it)
• Open source projects and products interfacing with/using XAPI
• XCP Management Tools - duplicates some of the info above
• More info on XAP

Why Choose XAPI?

By far the most versatile and feature-complete Xen toolstack is XAPI. XAPI is production-ready and purpose-built for Xen. It is default in XenServer and XCP. It is the API that cloud orchestration software such as

• CloudStack
• OpenNebula
• OpenStack

use to interact with Xen. XCP comes in two flavours:

• As ISO in a defined and pre-configures set-up that is installed on bare-metal systems (download)
• As packages to be installed on standard Linux distributions:
  • Debian Info
  • Ubuntu Info
  • XCP toolstack on a Debian-based distribution

Finally, there are several design decisions that make it a better choice than libvirt (see Why XAPI?).

libvirt / VIRSH

libvirt is a virtualization API/toolkit used to manage various virtualization technologies. There is a libxenlight port of libvirt.

Also see:

• libvirt Xen hypervisor driver
• Applications using libvirt
• libvirt Xen architecture
• You can use virsh to manage xen virtual servers: here are some basic commands using virsh
• Virsh & managing Xen DomUs on openSUSE 11.2

Default / XEND (Deprecated in Xen 4.1)

XEND is the previous toolstack and continues to be included as part of the Xen source releases. However as of Xen 4.1 XEND is now deprecated and will likely be removed in a future release. It is recommended that new deployments use one of the other toolstacks discussed above.

xl was designed to be command line compatible with the xm CLI to xend and this should provide the easiest upgrade path.

Also See

• XL vs Xend Feature Comparison
• XEND

Command Line Interface (CLI) Tools

The table shows the command line tools to use with each of the toolstacks.

Toolstack CLI Tools

Toolstack	xl	XAPI	libvirt	xend
CLI tool	xl	xe	virsh	xm

Note: xl does not have a toolstack/cli split since the toolstack is the cli. Hence it appears under both headings.

Toolstack Feature Comparison

Features	xl	xapi	libvirt
Purpose-built for Xen	✓	✓	✗
Basic VM Operations	✓	✓	✓
Managed Domains	✗	✓	✓
Live Migration	✓	✓	✓
PCI Passthrough	✓	✓	✓
Host Pools	✗	✓	✗
Flexible, Advanced Storage Types	✗	✓	✗
Built-in advanced performance monitoring (RRDs)	✗	✓	✗
Host Plugins (XAPI)	✗	✓	✗

Summary

The power and flexibility of the management of Xen is an important feature. Users have a choice to use xl, XAPI, libvirt, or another toolstack to manage their Xen system(s).

• xl is very lightweight and is a great choice for develpers or users who are most comfortable with Unix like CLI tools.

• XAPI is a powerful toolstack that provides domain life-cycle management, pool-awareness (multiple Xen systems added to a central logical pool), and many other advanced features available with Xen.

• libvirt is a generalized virtualization layer for managing various virtualization technlogies with a common toolkit (or toolstack).