XO milestones

Many of you ask us "when the new version of XO will be available, at least for testing purpose?" First thing first, I'll explain important milestones.

First "public" beta: before 2013!

Yes, it can be the last day of 2012, but this first pre-version will be released as a demonstrator for our architecture choice (does it work with many XCP hosts? 40 clients? on different OS?) Don't expect nice UI, it's more about validation. If our expectations are met,  we'll continue to the 1.0...

1.0: Xen Orchestra "Archlute"

Archlute will be the first stable version of XO. When we say stable, it means usable in production. Not a lot of features for this one, but a good working base for further developments:

  • works with XAPI (xcp) on Debian 7 with Kronos Project

  • connect to XCP servers

  • list VM's in each server (global view as previous version of XO)

  • permissions and local users (R/W/Admin)

  • packaged in a repository for Debian, with almost few clicks to be operational

Release often

Our goal is to correct bugs and go on next version ASAP. For example, version 2.0 of XO (named "Baryton") can afford:

  • nice GUI for adding server
  • nice GUI for managing users
  • backend filled with all metrics
  • LDAP compatible
  • Tags for better search
    Of course, this is only a forecast of features: it can evolve, because it's community driven.

But now?

Currently, our team work on two things:

  • global architecture of XO (will be explained in a future post)
  • displaying smartly the -great- amount of XAPI informations to a web UI (our ergonomist is sketching right now)
  • think about what you need in XO (we think about doing a survey for that)

Survey

A good survey will help us to go in the right direction. XAPI expose more features than we can implement in a small amount of time. We need to make choices, and we prefer to make them relevant. Please read this post about that question.