AB Meeting/February 2014 Minutes

Attendees

• Lars Kurth (Citrix, chair, non-voting)
• Guido Trotter (Google, voting)
• Matt Wilson (AWS, voting)
• Konrad Wilk (Oracle, voting)
• Sherry Hurwitz (AMD, voting)
• Antony Messerli (Rackspace, voting)
• Daniel Kiper (Oracle)
• James Bulpin (Citrix)
• Mark Hinkle (Citrix, voting)
• Demetrios Coulis (CA, voting)
• Richard Phelan (ARM, voting)
• Sarah Conway (Linux Foundation)

Quorum with 8 organisations

Agenda

Welcome new AB members

Antony (as well as Paul Voccio) work in the Rackspace Cloud Services Division that use Xen. Rackspace wants to contribute more to the Xen project, which is the reason why Rackspace joined the Xen Project. Rackspace is also interested in participating in the Test Framework WG, but have not yet nominated a representative.

@Antony, if you want to add anything off-line, please feel free to do so. Also, it would be good if you could let me know Rackspace’s representative on the Test Framework WG before Feb 26; otherwise it will be logistically difficult to add your representative to the invite for the next meeting (failing that: please e-mail Chris dot Shepherd at Citrix dot com – he should be able to forward the invite).

Holiday cover for AB chairmanship

Lars will be on vacation from Feb 26 – March 18 and won’t be able to attend and chair the next AB meeting. Mark Hinkle volunteered to take this over.

Note that we did dismiss a face-2-face board meeting at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit as there was not enough momentum. However, we can have an informal lunch or other meeting. Mark volunteered to organize this.

 Action Mark Hinkle: Will reach out to advisory board to see who will attend and would be interested in an informal meeting. Mark will reach out to Angela Brown to make this happen.

Moving XCP binaries (but not XAPI project) from Xen Project to XenServer.org

The fact that the Xen Project hosts these legacy binaries are hosted on Xen Project is creating a lot of confusion in the user community and fragmenting it. There are also trademark issues as the Xen Project does not have the trademark to call XCP the Xen Cloud Platform.

I would like to propose to move these to XenServer.org which will fix confusion, community fragmentation and trademark issues.

Vote|Motion:  Carried

 Action Lars: Call a vote within the Xen Project community to get community feedback ✓ carried

Events Roadmap (Lars)

Xen Project Hackathon

The event would be sponsored and organized by the Trilogy2 project (http://www.trilogy2.it.uc3m.es/) and hosted by NEC. The Trilogy2 project is a part-EU funded research project. Here is the Trilogy2 charter:

       The Trilogy project aims to build a new Internet architecture based on the key concept of the 
       liquid network. A liquid system should ideally allow resources including bandwidth, storage 
       and processing to be used by any application, whether they are contributed by network 
       operators, data centre operators or end-user systems

       More detail at : http://www.trilogy2.it.uc3m.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/T2-project-summary.pdf

There are some advantages having the event sponsored by Trilogy2, such as telcos (BT and others) getting engaged with the Xen Project.

Lars was asking whether maybe one of the AB member companies who have offices in the EU may want to host instead, as it would be better if an AB member was going to host a Xen Hackathon. Antony stated that Rackspace has offices in Amsterdam and the UK and may be interested in hosting. Due to timing, we would need an answer *before* Feb 8 (otherwise arranging travel for attendees will be too late)

 Action Lars: Follow up with Antony off-line ✓ Rackspace will host the event

Vote|Motion:  If we cannot agree to host the event at Rackspace before Feb 24, the board endorses sponsorship by Trilogy2 hosted at NEC

Xen Project Developer Summit

See http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/xen-project-developer-summit (still some changes to the site needed before we promote it as there are some inconsistencies on the site)

Location: Chicago, IL from Aug 18-19 Developer Meeting Aug 20

 Action Lars: Start planning face-2-face advisory board meeting for the week of Aug 18 (Aug 20 looks like the best candidate)

Linux Foundation Collab Summit Overview

We will have a 1/2 day Xen track and content in the automotive track. We had 6 submissions, but can only host 4. I wanted to thank Citrix, Intel and oracle for submitting talks.

The list of talks which will be accepted into the Xen track are:

• Xen 4.4 overview talk (Citrix)
• XenGT talk (Intel)
• PVH talk

• Automotive Xen talk in automotive track (GlobalLogic)

 Action Lars: Follow up when acceptance mails are sent out as these have not been sent out ✓ Notifications will be sent out by the Linux Foundation later today

Review and sign off Xen Project PR plan (Sarah)

The plan is attached. Sarah walked through the key elements and we discussed opportunities for vendors to act as spokespeople.

Vote|Motion:  The Xen Project PR plan was approved

During the review, Sarah mentioned several discussions that have happened on the publicity mailing list. See http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/publicity/ - a recent example was http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/publicity/2014-02/msg00030.html (Docker Open Source Container Virtualization on the Rise). Typically we get good engagement from active community members on that list now, however most AB members are not signed up.

 Action All: Please verify whether this list is of interest and do sign up via http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/publicity (or drop me a line and I can sign you up)

Spokespeople

Normally Lars acts as spokesperson for the project for Xen releases. However the Xen 4.4 release is likely to happen in early March when Lars is on holidays.

Would any AB representatives volunteer as spokesperson for the Xen 4.4 release? The fall-back would be George Dunlap (Citrix) and Stefano Stabellini (Citrix).

Konrad Wilk volunteered to cover Xen 4.4 and maybe Collab Summit, but will need to get approval

 Action Konrad: Check with Wim and get any internal approvals

 Action Sarah: Connect with Konrad in a week

Xen 4.4 Release Press Release

Sarah will send final version for review to advisory-board@lists.xenproject.org – typically there will be a deadline of 3-5 days and if there is no veto, the proposal is accepted.

 Action Sarah: Send final version for board review (@Sarah, please also share the draft with Stefano Stabellini, George Dunlap, Konrad and everybody else who requests access to early drafts)

Brief update on upcoming PR opportunities

These are opportunities to act as spokespeople on specific issues, for press interviews, articles, etc. – The Linux Foundation will work with spokespeople and coach as appropriate

• Spokesperson for pro-active “Docker Open Source Container Virtualization on the Rise” pitch to press (see http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/publicity/2014-02/msg00030.html). If no AB rep is interested we will use a community member on the publicity list. Timing: late March
• Xen 4.4 / CollabSummit – see above

Other opportunities from PR plan:

• Virtualization Jumpstarts Automotive Infotainment Systems

 Action Lars: Introduce Sarah to GlobalLogic; Rudolf Streif from the LF may also be a good candidate. Note that we have no AB member in the automotive space yet.

• Cloud and Software-Defined Data Centers Shape Hypervisors of the Future

This could be of interest for AMD, Intel, AWS, Rackspace, Verizon and others – please discuss internally and get back to Sarah if interested

• Hybrid Virtualization On the Rise

This could be of interest for AMD, Intel, AWS, Rackspace, Verizon and others Mark Hinkle also volunteered to see if a CloudStack community member using Xen may be interested.
 Action Mark: Follow up and make introductions if nobody else steps up

• We did not manage to cover the other topics: the “Suggested Trend Features, Expert Commentary & Contributed Articles” section of the plan and see whether there are opportunities that interest you.

 Action All: Please review “Suggested Trend Features, Expert Commentary & Contributed Articles” and get in touch with Sarah if interested

 Action Lars & Sarah: Reach out individually to AB members we believe could be interested, where no-one steps up

Membership Dues update (Linux Foundation)

We had no LF rep who could cover this.

• Verizon : finalized LF Gold membership and Xen project membership.
• Rackspace : PR will be bundled up with other new members (likely around Collab Summit)
• Samsung : Xen Project Paperwork is still stuck in Korea. A meeting/conf-call is planned for end of Feb to resolve
• Calxeda : All Calxeda emails started bouncing

 Action Lars: Follow up with Kevlin

Update on Test Framework - we are making some real progress (Lars)

See http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/wg-test-framework/2014-02/msg00004.html