Xen.org announced the latest release of the Xen hypervisor, the open source industry standard for virtualization, reaching version 3.4.

Xen.org writes that the new 3.4 release furthers the vision of creating a powerful, efficient, and ubiquitous virtualization hypervisor.  As part of the Xen community’s commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:

•    Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements –Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.

•    Reliability – Availability - Serviceability (RAS) – In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

•    Power Management - Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.

On average, Xen.org receives more than 750 new code submissions to the source tree each month from developers across the world working on an array of solutions within the hypervisor. Industry leading companies such as Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, Fujitsu, and Novell are part of the vibrant Xen.org community and contribute to the development of the hypervisor code.

Xen 3.4 is currently available via free download to developers by visiting the Xen.org website at: http://www.xen.org/download

In addition, the Xen.org community is committed to providing more resources to its members:

•    Xen.org Solutions Search is a new online tool enabling customers to quickly find consultants, hosting providers, developers, and solutions built on the Xen hypervisor platform. This search system profiles the growing ecosystem for the Xen hypervisor.

•    Xen.org is committing resources to expand the global footprint for support and promotion of the open source Xen hypervisor. Materials are being translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese with the community Wiki now available in English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Chinese, Korean Japanese, and Italian. Support groups for customers are also available in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Italian.

•    Finally, Xen.org is excited to offer an event for virtualization customers and prospects in Europe called Xen Directions, being held in conjunction with LinuxTAG on June 27, 2009 in Berlin, Germany.  A variety of hands-on Xen demonstrations will be offered to the European technical audience for the first time. In 2010, Xen.org will be hosting the first event in South America as part of the FISL event in Brazil.