Xen Project Developer Summit

Currently xen-api is really only installed today as part of XenServer. It has traditional enterprise style releases, with controlled upgrades and hotfixes when required.

When deploying OpenStack Rackspace, with the help of the OpenStack community, have adopted an approach where any check-in could be deployed, and the system upgraded, from any other checkin from that last release, or earlier in the current release.

It would be interesting to see if xen-api could move towards a model. At a minimum having more regular check points where an upgrade would be possible.

When running a cloud, a very small amount of control plane downtime is possible, but ideally there should be zero downtime for user's virtual machines. We should explore the ability to only upgrade Xen as a last resort, but still be able to update as much the control and data plane as possible, while keeping VMs alive.