We are planning a Xen Project User Survey. This page is a scratch pad to outline the questions in the survey, such that everyone can see what we are planning to cover. Feel free to use the {{Comment}} template to comment on questions: simply use

{{comment|~~~~}} your comment

and a comment using your user ID will automatically be added.

Patterns and Platforms

I believe we have a survey monkey account. Some of the questions require either a way of ranking features and/or system properties or awarding a number of limited points to features/system properties/etc, as otherwise we will not get good data.

There are two ways of doing this

Rating Scale : the issue here is that people are encouraged to rate everything highly and that thus we don't get good date
- Investigating this further forced ranking questions seem to be the way to go - see question 3/2 ... not quite sure how to create them
Ranking Questions : this looks ideal, but it is not clear what happens with the default order. There is a risk that people will just stick with the default, which could skew the default
Quotas : It is not exactly clear how these work from the documentation and what the user experience is like
Should we add Don't know Options to many questions? See [1] for pros and cons of both approaches

Survey

Preamble

The Xen Project is conducting its first annual user survey. This data will be used as part of an upcoming report on trends within the Xen Project, to prioritize feature development and may help influence the future direction of the project. We would appreciate your help in taking five minutes to share your experiences with us.

Lars.kurth 10:43, 30 April 2014 (UTC) Need to test the survey for length and update the item above

dunlapg 12 May 2014 "Could be used"? Seems a bit of a strange thing to say -- why not just say "will be used"?

Lars.kurth 22 May 2014 Fixed

If you would like to be entered in our drawing for one of two $500 Amazon.com gift cards, please enter your email address at the end of the survey.

Lars.kurth 10:43, 30 April 2014 (UTC) Need to get funding for any prices

Use of Virtualization and Cloud

In the last 12 months, what best describes your organization's actions around server expansion (including physical or virtualized server or cloud server instances)?

Matrix:

Questions: Linux, Windows, Unix, Other OS
Answers: Added servers, Decreased servers, Neither added nor decreased servers, Not sure

How would you rate your organization’s progress toward public cloud adoption?

How would you rate your organization’s progress toward cloud adoption?

We have no plans to move to the cloud
We have started evaluating our options for moving into the cloud
We have started moving to the cloud but have a long way to go
We have moved some workloads to the cloud and are satisfied with our current situation
We have moved some workloads to the cloud and plan to do more
Not sure
Comments:

dunlapg 12 May 2014 Are you talking about public cloud, private cloud, or either one? It sounds like you're talking about public cloud.

Lars.kurth 16:06, 22 May 2014 (UTC) fixed

What is your current cloud model?

Mostly private cloud
Mostly public cloud
Hybrid cloud
We are not in the cloud
Not sure

What workloads are you currently running on within a VM (select all that apply)?

Matrix:

Questions: Application and Web Servers, Development Environments / Tools / Languages, Relational / Enterprise Databases, Email Systems, Desktop Productivity Applications, Systems Management, Standalone, Single-user Databases, CRM, ERP, Other
Answers: Presently Running, Plan to Run, Not Planning to Run

What best describes your plans with the following open source Virtualization solutions in the next 12 months?

Matrix:

Questions: Xen Project, KVM, Containers, Other
Answers: Not Aware Of, Evaluating, Plan to Deploy, In Deployment, Don’t Plan to Deploy, Don’t Know

dunlapg 12 May 2014 Maybe "your plans with the following..."? Also, why not put Xen Project first? :-)

Lars.kurth 16:07, 22 May 2014 (UTC) Fixed. These were listed alphabetically

What best characterizes your perception of Xen Project ?

What best characterizes your perception of Xen Project, since it became a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project?

The Xen Project has improved momentum, visibility and features
The Xen Project has stayed roughly the same
The Xen Project has lost ground compared to other open source virtualization technologies
Comments:

dunlapg 12 May 2014 I'm not sure I understand what "software is declining" is supposed to mean. In any case I don't think prompting someone into thinking, "Is Xen declining?" is a good idea. Maybe it would be better to do an "agree / disagree" scale on several aspects of development, such as: "Xen performance is continually improving", "Xen is continually developing new features", "Xen is on the cutting egde of new developments for the cloud", &c.

Lars.kurth 14:18, 21 May 2014 (UTC) Agreed. I copied these first set of questions from the Linux enterprise user survey. Also, it should probably just be Xen Project. The idea was that we could then correlate to it. Will think about better phrasing

Use of Xen Project

I neither use Xen Project software or participate in the Xen Project community : skip this section

Which Xen Project Software are you using?

Matrix
Questions: Xen Project Hypervisor, XCP or XAPI packages, Mirage OS
Answers: Not Aware Of, Evaluating, Plan to Deploy, In Deployment, Don’t Plan to Deploy, Don’t Know

Please state the latest version of Xen Project Software that you use (text box, or drop down including "Don’t Know" and "N/A")

Xen Project Hypervisor : 3.x, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4
XCP or XAPI packages : 1.0, 1.1, 1.6, XAPI packages in Debian, XAPI packages in Ubuntu, migrated to XenServer
Mirage OS is not applicable as we are at 1.x only

How large is your Xen Project Deployment?

0-10 hosts
11-50 hosts
51-100 hosts
101-500 hosts
500-1000 hosts
More than 1000 hosts

Rcpavlicek 11:54, 15 May 2014 (UTC) Need a "not sure" choice. Person responding may not know total scale of installation.

Lars.kurth 16:10, 22 May 2014 (UTC) I would sort of say that having a "not sure" choice is the easy way out. But we can add it

Hardware

I use Xen Project for embedded or other non-data center use-cases : skip this section

Servers

Who is your primary Server Vendor for Xen Project hosts?

Server vendor (HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu, Quanta, Supermicro, Other

How many CPU cores does the average server in your deployment have?

Small (1-2), Medium (4-8), Large (16-32), Very Large (>64)

Lars.kurth 13:13, 12 May 2014 (UTC) This may not be a valid categorisation

How much RAM does the average server in your deployment have?

Small (0 - 63.00), Medium (64 - 127.99), Large (128 - 255.99), Very Large (>256)

What make is your CPU for Xen Project hosts?

Intel, AMD, ARM, Other

Rcpavlicek 11:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)These are fair questions for people in IT operations, but many users will have no idea for any of these answers.

Lars.kurth 16:11, 22 May 2014 (UTC) In that case we can add a don't know to all of these

Storage

Who is your primary Storage Vendor for Xen Project hosts?

NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, IBM, FusionIO, Hitachi Data Systems, Atlantis, Tintri, Nutanix, Nexenta, Other

Network

Who is your primary Network card vendor

Intel, Broadcom, QLogic, Emulex, Mellanox, Cisco, Other

What is the lowest/typical/fastest network card in your setup?

Lowest: 1, 10, 20, 40 Gb/s
Typical: 1, 10, 20, 40 Gb/s
Fastest: 1, 10, 20, 40 Gb/s

Please list the primary version of the Xen Project Hypervisor that your are using

3.4
4.0
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
I don't know (using Xen in a distro or commercially based product that uses Xen Project software)

Please list the primary host Operating System or Commercial Product that you use to get the Xen Project Hypervisor (Dom 0)?

Please list primary the host Operating System or Commercial Product that you use to get the Xen Project Hypervisor (Dom 0)?

Custom built from source
Alpine Linux
CentOS 5.x
CentOS 6.4+ (Xen4CentOS)
Debian
Fedora
Mageia
NetBSD
Ubuntu
OpenSUSE
Huawei UVP
Oracle VM for x86 (OVS)
Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x (RHEL)
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES)
XenServer

Rcpavlicek 12:01, 15 May 2014 (UTC) Again, if they user is not an IT ops person, they might want to answer "I don't know."

Lars.kurth 16:13, 22 May 2014 (UTC) I would argue that we don't want responses if they do not give us much information. But we can add a don't know catregory

Please list the guest Operating Systems that you use on top of the Xen Project Hypervisor

Pattern: Matrix, one per row
Columns:

Alpine Linux
CentOS
Debian
Fedora
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenSUSE
Ubuntu
Oracle Linux
RHEL
SUSE Enterprise Linux
Solaris
Windows XP/7/8.x
Windows Server
Other

Rows: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

dunlapg 12 May 2014 You mean "Operating systems you run as a guest"?

Lars.kurth 16:25, 22 May 2014 (UTC) This TODO relates to a separate question. I.e. do we want to know whether people heard/used about OSv, Mirage OS, ... However, I think I will do this as one of the later questions

Rcpavlicek 12:13, 15 May 2014 (UTC) We could get skewed data here. The person who knows about the number of hosts may not know the guest information unless it is a fairly uniform deployment. Users who know the guests they use may have guessed at the size of the total install, but their guest usage may not represent the usage of the total install. So weighting the guest data by the host data (which I assume we will do) could result in a false impression.

Lars.kurth 16:25, 22 May 2014 (UTC) There is no perfect way of doing this. I'd rather have slightly skewed data than no data (as today). But we can add don't know. The problem is that this will encourage people to use Don't knows most of the time - see [2]. I added this to the top section and we can decide later.

Which of the following System Characteristics are important to you?

Pattern: forced ranking, maybe restrict to 5
Options:

Commercial Support (commercial support and consulting is available)
Ease of Use (it is easy to get started, most common use-cases can be performed easily and good documentation is available)
Performance overhead - CPU (low CPU performance overhead of your workload)
Performance overhead - Disk and I/O (low disk and other I/O overheads)
Performance overhead - Network (low network overheads)
Quality (low number of bugs when deploying your software)
Reliability and Robustness (an architecture that reduces unexpected errors and reliably recovers in unexpected error situations)
Scalability (the number of virtual machines that can be run on a single host with good performance)
Security (additional security functionality such as SELinux, XSM, Disaggregation, vTPM and good security processes)
Third party solutions (many 3rd party solutions and integrations are available)
Versatility (the capability to customize your virtualization solution to all of your needs)

Rcpavlicek 12:17, 15 May 2014 (UTC) Suggest we add "Basic Cloud Functionality (migration, failover)" or something like it; basically someone saying that things like XAPI and Remus are a priority for them

Lars.kurth 16:34, 22 May 2014 (UTC) That would be part of the next question