Fedora goes towards KVM, away from Xen

Fedora 13 (to be released in May 2010) will add some interesting features:

• Kernel acceleration for KVM networking (off by default, considered unstable)
• Stable PCI addreses, shared network interfaces
• Enhanced VNC access to guests - tunnelling audio otput and serial console
• Better authentication and encryption support in libvirt

Most of these only work with KVM. Another new tool will enable automatic migration from Xen to KVM. Xen dom0 support is planned "if it's supported by the mainstream kernel". Read: it won't be available.

While I welcome these additions to KVM, I think it's a pity that Xen support is gradually phased out from the main Linux distributions. What can you do if you have servers without hardware virtualization support, but otherwise completely fine?

• Buy new servers and send the old ones to a growing heap of electronic junk in some 3rd world country.
  
• Spend hours compiling and configuring the software yourself. 
• Use on a few distros that still supports Xen - if you can live with 2.6.18 kernel. I think that now we're only left with Scientific Linux and Debian.
  

References:
www.virtualization.info/2010/01/fedora-13-to-simplify-migration-from.html