 | The open source community release of Xen 3.0 from XenSource, Inc |
The first major release in over a year, the Xen project has delivered a compelling virtualization feature set that is squarely targeted at enterprise infrastructure virtualization needs, focusing on support for symmetric multi-processing (SMP), large server memory configurations and near-native performance, and offering for the first time an ability to virtualize all guest operating systems.
Xen 3.0 supports Intel® Virtualization Technology, which allows virtualized servers to run natively on the processor, exploiting hardware acceleration for CPU and memory virtualization. This support is key to Xen’s ability to virtualize all operating systems. Xen will also support AMD’s Pacifica hardware virtualization early in 2006.
The community release signals that the code base is functionally complete and ready for further testing and validation by the Xen community. "We have been working hard to make Xen 3.0 available to the major Enterprise Linux vendors so they can begin QA for their next major releases, and to deliver a hypervisor that can exploit hardware virtualization and thus support proprietary operating systems," said Pratt. "Now we are turning our focus to extending our community testing program, hardening, and performance-tuning."
This release represents the first public availability of the Xen 3.0 code base and feature set to the broader open source Xen community allowing Xen partners and vendors to now begin perform performance testing and quality assurance, stabilization, and development of their Xen-based offerings. Xen 3.0 will be distributed by the leading enterprise Linux distributors, in Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sun also recently announced plans to offer paravirtualized Solaris on x64 virtual servers running on Xen.
Open Source Xen 3.0
