XenSource, Inc., the leader of the open source Xen
™ virtualization project and a provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, today announced the release of Xen 3.1. The latest release of the Xen hypervisor delivers features to support the most demanding enterprise virtualization use cases, and open, standards-based management interfaces for the ISV ecosystem.
“The Xen hypervisor offers advanced enterprise virtualization features and is uniquely positioned as an open source industry standard hypervisor capable of exploiting the latest virtualization-ready server and client platforms,” said Ian Pratt, Xen project leader and founder of XenSource. “Xen 3.1 is the most compelling demonstration to date of the commitment and the excellence of the Xen open source development community. The Xen architecture is equally well suited to industry standard x86 clients and servers, high-end Intel Itanium® platforms, and PowerPC based systems.”
Key new features include:
- Enhanced 64 bit hypervisor – Extends Xen’s paravirtualization support to allow simultaneous virtualization of both 32- and 64-bit paravirtualized Linux virtual machines. Together with Xen’s existing support for 32 and 64 bit hardware assisted virtual machines (HVM), this enables Xen 3.1 to simultaneously virtualize legacy 32 bit Linux and Windows guests, and key 64 bit enterprise workloads such as Microsoft® Exchange Server, SQL Server 2007, Oracle, DB2 and SAP. The 64 bit hypervisor can exploit very large memory configurations to permit virtualization of memory hungry and performance sensitive database applications, and increases server consolidation ratios by enabling Xen to host large numbers of VMs on a single server. This, combined with Xen’s fast, paravirtualized I/O and support for up to 32 physical CPUs, makes Xen 3.1 the most scalable hypervisor available. Also included is pre-silicon support for AMD enhanced page table management.
- Live relocation – supports live relocation and dynamic memory control for virtual machines using Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) or AMD® Virtualization (AMD-V) hardware-assisted virtualization, which enables dynamic resource scheduling and “no-downtime maintenance” of Microsoft® Windows® based virtual infrastructures.
- XenAPI – offers a rich management API for support of the rapidly developing ISV ecosystem of value-added features for the Xen hypervisor, and an XML-RPC based management API that supports the Xen project's implementation of the evolving DMTF standard for virtualization management.
“Virtualization solutions like Xen can help clients simplify their infrastructure and reduce the complexity of a data center,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, Virtualization and IT Optimization, IBM. “IBM contributed to Xen 3.1 to help clients achieve deeper and richer features reinforcing that open source technologies, like the Xen hypervisor, are enterprise-ready.”
“Xen 3.1 release allows migration of fully virtualized guest operating systems using Intel® Virtualization Technology,” said Doug Fisher, vice president System Software Division, Intel. “Intel’s contributions to Xen enable users to take advantage of Intel® Processor Technologies for better resource management across the entire system.”
“With the release of Xen 3.1, the Xen community has set a new bar for enterprise virtualization,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource. “Our customers tell us that we outperform proprietary virtualization solutions for Windows and Linux. They are impressed by the robustness and breadth of features we bring to market, and our commitment to developing a strong ISV ecosystem.”
Key contributors to Xen 3.1 include XenSource, Intel, IBM, Novell, VA Linux (Japan), HP, Fujitsu, SGI, Red Hat, AMD, Sun, Unisys and the National Security Agency.