Xen project Mailing List

Hi all,

I wanted to add some extra context to this announcement. Citrix making available the code of XenRT is also an important step for the Xen Project (with it, in effect phase 1/3 of creating a more comprehensive framework for the Xen Project is complete). At the last Advisory Board meeting, the following AB members agreed to form a Test Framework Committee to look at next steps on how we can make this happen. The companies which so far agreed to be on the committee are AMD, Amazon Web Services, CA, Calxeda, Citrix, Intel and Oracle. For more details, see http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/AB_Meeting/August_2013_Minutes#.231_Open_Source_testing_framework

The basic idea is to create a test-as-a-service framework for the Xen Project which is hosted at a vendor neutral location. The framework would be open to the community to extend. It will still take some time to complete this work (probably Q1 next year). This does mean, that the project will not have an alternative to OSS test for some time.

I am planning to schedule a BoF and/or session at the Xen Developer Meeting to get more community input. I expect that members of the still to be formed Test Framework Committee will work with the wider development community.

Best Regards

Lars

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Alex Brett <Alex.Brett@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As a follow up activity to the open sourcing of XenServer, Citrix is pleased to announce the open sourcing of its automated test platform, XenRT.

XenRT ("Xen Regression Test") is a test automation framework, written in Python, providing abstractions for the various components under test (pool, host, VM, storage, network etc). The library code which makes up these abstractions simplifies the process of writing tests, allowing quite complex operations to be performed in a single method call.

In a full deployment, XenRT handles all aspects of the testing process - it will schedule a test job onto a host, bootstrap it (via DHCP/PXE), install the build to be tested, carry out the testing, and collect all necessary logs for troubleshooting, without any user interaction required.

In addition to basic functional, regression, and stress testing, XenRT has suites of tests that are used for testing performance, scalability, and interoperability.

Within Citrix, XenRT is used with a distributed lab comprised of an extremely wide range of hardware, and is developed and maintained by a team of some 25 developers. Tests are also written and executed directly by the wider XenServer engineering team, in a true "Test-as-a-Service" platform - see http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/08/30/xenserver-automated-testing-and-lab-orchestration-introducing-xenrt/ for more information.

XenRT has been open sourced to leverage Citrix's experience and resources in test automation to help improve the quality of open source Xen and XenServer releases, to benefit the entire community.

To get started with XenRT, follow the links below to the code and a README document (which contains getting started instructions - further documentation will follow in the near future). For discussion a mailing list has been created - information about this can be found at https://lists.xenserver.org/sympa/info/xenrt-users

README document:
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/8169/README

Main XenRT tarball:
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/8168/xenrt.tgz

Third party test resource tarball:
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/8169/tests.tgz

Source for third party resources (not required for normal operation):
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/8169/tests-source.tgz

Kind Regards,
Alex Brett

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Re: [Xen-devel] Introducing Open Source XenRT