AB Meeting/May 2014 Minutes

== Attendees ==
* Sarah Conway (Linux Foundation)
* Lars Kurth (Chair)
* Don Dugger, Jun Nakajima (Intel) 
* Major Hayden, Antony Messerli (Rackspace) 
* Larry Wikelius (Cavium)
* Daniel Kiper (Oracle) 
* Michelle P Dominijanni (Verizon / Terremark) 
* Mark Hinkle, James Bulpin (Citrix) 
* Demetrios Coulis (CA Technologies) 
* Ian Pratt (Bromium) 
* Richard Phelan (ARM) 
Quorum: 9
== Agenda ==
=== Do we have enough momentum for a Xen+libvirt initiative? ===
The background is that in the latest OpenStack User Survey we have lost ground.
Hypervisor Usage											
												
	Total	KVM	Xen/XS	ESX	Containers**	Other		KVM	Xen/XS 	ESX	Containers**	Others
Dev / QA	309	175	39	22	28	45		56.6%	12.6%	7.1%	9.1%	14.6%
POC	327	169	54	38	24	42		51.7%	16.5%	11.6%	7.3%	12.8%
Production	268	173	28	19	17	31		64.6%	10.4%	7.1%	6.3%	11.6%
May-14*	904	517	121	79	69	118	 	57.2%	13.4%	8.7%	7.6%	13.1%
											
Oct-13*	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	62.0%	16.0%	8.0%	5.0%	9.0%
Apr-13*	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	71.0%	13.0%	8.0%	5.0%	3.0%
												
http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey
*) Includes Dev / QA, POC and Production
**) Includes LXE, OpenVZ, Docker 							
There are probably a number of reasons:
1) The risk of libvirt+xen being deprecated was highly advertised on the mailing lists and while that deprecation has not happened (and likely won’t) this would have an impact on adoptions for new PoCs. NOTE: that there were some meetings at the design summit to make progress
2) Citrix not pushing for OpenStack in the same way that all other hypervisor vendors are
Lars: Losing ground in OpenStack could potentially be problematic for the Xen Project as some quarters of the media see OpenStack equivalent to Cloud. Also being excluded from OpenStack distributions could hurt the project in the longer term.
Questions: 
a) Is there scope for an alliance amongst some AB members to push Xen in OpenStack
b) Also there was discussion at the summit and see whether we (the Xen Project) can tie Xen+libvirt into the OpenStack CI loop.
Discussion:
Don: makes the point that there are only two ways to address this
a) bring xen+libvirt up to parity with kvm+libvirt 
b) bring XAPI up to parity with kvm+libvirt 
Also see https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix
James: more interested in CloudStack and interested in fixing gaps in xen+libvirt
Don: if you fix libvirt you fix OpenStack
Antony: at the OpenStack summit there has been a lot of focus on libvirt (XAPI and xen+libvirt has been left on the side). In the long term it is better to support xen+libvirt within OpenStack
Don: Personal opinion - we should focus on xen+libvirt
Lars: What is Oracle’s position? 
Daniel: Oracle uses xen+libvirt in Oracle’s OpenStack distribution. We discussed this issue with Konrad shortly and there is a will to work on it. However, we do not have details yet. I hope that we will be able to get back shortly.
Summary: 
a) It appears that we may have enough backing for an Advisory Board initiative to improve Xen+libvirt
b) We agreed that the first step must be: getting feature parity with Xen+libvirt vs. KVM+libvirt
b) Note that there is some engineering discussion going on at the Xen Hacklathon in a week (the RedHat libvirt maintainer is attending)
: Lars to send report from Hackathon discussion next week to help scope put scale of issue
Antony: There was a risk of Xen+libvirt support being deprecated in Icehouse. Libvirt + Xen testing would result in keeping the code in OpenStack
Lars: How does the CI loop work? Does OpenStack run the whole test suite? Is the problem that there is a lack of tests? Or is the problem that tests fail?
Antony: There are different hypervisor tiers (XAPI=tier B), (Xen+libvirt=tier C) – also see https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix
Antony: For Xen+libvirt we would need to set up a xen cluster, see what breaks and fix issues
Lars: For XAPI would we have to write new tests?
Note: this stayed unanswered
=== Member and Media Updates ===
==== Member updates (if new member can be disclosed by the meeting) ====
Cavium joined the Xen Project with Larry Wikelius being the primary voting representative (under embargo until June 3)
Larry was previously representative for Calxeda, but now works for Cavium
Larry: We publicly talked a little bit about Project Thunder. Xen is important around that product line. 
Lars: Will send out a press release next week for approval 
==== Media updates and Analyst Meeting (Sarah)====
Press releases in the last month:
* Several CentOS stories, but no in-depth coverage
* Rackspace release
Prospects
* Interest in high proportion (4 out of 7) female GSoC/OPW interests in Xen Project for a story 
Analyst Meeting preparation:
* Started interviews for developing messaging and analyst deck. Goal: Getting the big picture from Advisory Board members
* Done: AMD, RAX, Cavium
* Planned: Citrix
* Requested to Intel and Verizon: no response
: Follow up internally within Verizon as to who the right person is
: Sarah to send questions to Michelle
: Sarah to send questions to list 
: interested vendors to get back to Sarah 
Sarah: Putting together analyst and influencer deck
Sarah: target for briefing June
=== Budget Update ===
==== Updated Budget which tracks planned, spent, and approved spending ====
Either as risk (for events) or specifically allocated (to be sent out by Lars tomorrow)
See “Xen Project Provisional Budget for 2014 v4 - May Update.xls”
Lars walked through how the spreadsheet works.
Lars: Does this work for everyone. Should we mark unapproved funds where we underspent?
Don: Would lose information on what we approved
Lars: Will come up with a revision. 
Richard: Would we carry approved items over into the new year?
Lars: I don’t see any reason why we could not do this. We can just mark items as approved in 2014 and carry over as approved into the new budget. If anyone had a concrete objection, we could cover this then.
Mark: Would there be a possible issue with non-profit status if we carried planned items into the new year?
: Come up with a better proposal – see “Xen Project Provisional Budget for 2014 v4 - May20 Update.xls” … Added column I “Available for Allocation” which contains Planned-Unspent
: Check with Brian whether there any accounting constraints carrying over approved budget into following year
==== Approve spending for Xen Project Hackathon ====
I also wanted to get approval during the meeting for funding the evening social event at the Xen Project Hackathon. Rackspace will pick up 50% of the cost and provide space and catering during the day. The cost breakdown is as follows:
Venue hire: GBP 500 + VAT = GBP 600
Security Guard: 13 + VAT per hour (4 hours) = GBP 62,50
Food: GBP 1796.4 (inc VAT)
Drinks: GBP 648 (inc VAT)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total: GBP 3106.90
Total covered by the project: GBP 1553.45
In USD: 2613.68 but I suggest to approve USD 3000 to cover for exchange rate fluctuations 
The plan is for the project to pay the entire sum and for Rackspace to pay the project 50% using a sponsoring contract.
 Approve this expense
Carried
Note: Updated in “Xen Project Provisional Budget for 2014 v4 - May20 Update.xls”
=== Xen Project 4.4 Retrospective ===
See “Xen Project 4.4 Retrospective.doc”
Lars: Briefly walked through section of the document (mainly negatives) and gave updates
Lars: Will provide regular updates and see whether we can broaden engagement beyond the Citrix open source team
Xen Project Infrastructure: Russell is scoping out security improvements with web site supplier
End User Engagement: small improvements, but still an issue
a) We are seeing minor improvements to on-ramp since the report started, e.g. a Fedora Live CD for Xen is being worked on
b) Questions on Q&A system are being answered more than before. This will be one of Russell’s focus areas for Q2 and Q3
c) The April Document Day has been more active than in the previous 9 months. Monitor May Document Day
d) Have a draft version of Xen Project User Survey, but need to consolidate some of the questions. Will work on these with Developers at the Hackathon
Code Reviews
We have a bottleneck in review capacity in the community, which has stayed the same while new contributors are joining 
New contributors are taking up more review capacity than established contributors
The consequence is that contributions in terms of changesets and Lines of code are remaining static – thus we may not meet the growth target of 10% that we set as project objective
Don: The review process could be improved
Lars: Has scheduled a process improvement discussion at the Hackathon
Don: Quality is more important than increasing the number of contributions to the project
Upstream Issues
Larry: was concerned about Linaro issues
Lars: Linaro CI loop is often broken (affecting Xen, KVM and other technologies). This has been raised with Linaro. Will monitor
Lars: x86 testing issues will be further discussed at the Hackathon
Distro Support
Lars: Improved Xen Support in Ubuntu and more usability improvements in the pipeline
Lars: Leading the CentOS SIG has so far been successful. Improvement of relationship with RedHat (e.g. 3 RedHat Engineers will attend the Hackathon). However it is unclear whether this will lead to any commercial changes in the long run.
Perception of Xen Project in the Media
Generally positive, but struggling to get message across related to Performance and Security
Lars: The issue with performance is lack of public comparative performance data for Xen vs. other Hypervisors
Sarah: How did you promote security
Lars: We have been giving Security related talks at most events, but do not appear to reach a wider audience. Discuss with Sarah.
: Please ask questions on the list if there are areas of concern
=== Action Summary from last meeting ===
Open / In Progress
* Action Sarah: share a template and example for a Analysts Presentation with the AB (have to check NDAs) … shared with Lars, need to see which can be shared more widely (cover)
* Action Brian: go back to Samsung and explain that there may be a media impact as Samsung was part of the launch press release
Done
* Action Sarah: Remove Calxeda from press boilerplate
* Action Sarah: propose a working time-line/project plan for Analysts Presentation
Closed
* Action All: Please reach out to your development teams regarding the Xen Project Developer Summit CfP via http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/xen-project-developer-summit/program/cfp
* Action All: If you (or members of your teams) do want to attend the Hackathon, please register now before we hit capacity. Invites are requested via http://xenproject.org/component/content/article/98-developers/vote/166-request-invite-hackathon-2014.html
* Action All: Pass on information about Xen project Summit sponsorships to your marketing departments (seehttp://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/xen-project-developer-summit/sponsor & http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/xen-project-user-summit/sponsor)
* Action All: Socialize within your organization whether you want to participate in the Analysts Presentation / Preparation and contact Sarah or Lars
Category:Advisory Board