KVM is live! Goodbye Xen..

We have finished our new virtualization platform based on KVM. We've already migrated all of our own VPS's and over the next couple of weeks all customer VPS's will be migrated from Xen to KVM as well.

As of today, all new VPS's will be provisioned on the KVM platform. So if you were waiting for a VPS hosting provider running KVM, now is the time to sign up! :)

Of course we will notify all our customers in advance before we migrate their VPS. There will be some downtime for each VPS, but on average no more than 30 minutes. The reason for this is that we have to migrate the block devices to a new server running KVM while making some small manual modifications to each VPS:

• The new KVM platform uses partitions, whereas on Xen we created the filesystem directly on the block device without any partitions.
• The serial console for KVM is configured differently (ttyS0 on KVM vs xvc0 and hvc0 on Xen), so we have to fix that.
  
• We have to install a bootloader on the VPS (grub), whereas on Xen we used a stub domain (pvgrub) to boot the VPS.

Once we've done that, we boot the VPS on KVM and make sure it comes up properly. After that, the original VPS image will be removed. Most customers will probably not even notice anything has changed, except for some downtime.

I would like to shout out a big thumbs up for Ruben, who did most of the KVM implementation and the migration planning. Thanks dude!

I also would like to use this opportunity to thank Xen for serving us so well. We've had our differences, but in the end you were always there when we needed you. Goodbye Xen..