Xen.org announced the release of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) 0.5, a complete open-source cloud infrastructure platform with a powerful management toolstack based on open APIs, support for multi-tenancy, QoS and detailed metrics for consumption based charging.

The XCP 0.5 bits have been tested extensively (including 100,000s of CPU-hours) and are considered suitable for production use.

XCP 0.5 can be downloaded from:

http://www.xen.org/products/cloud_source.html

XCP 0.5 contains the following features:
* xen 3.4.2
* linux 2.6.27
* openvswitch
* fully signed windows PV drivers
* improved SR-IOV support
* heterogeneous machine resource pool support
* templates for many different guest types (including latest Ubuntu, Debian)
* full-featured enterprise-class management toolstack
** multi-host resource pools
** live VM snapshots, checkpoints, migration
** disaster recovery support
** flexible storage, networking, host power management
** event tracking, progress notification
** performance monitoring and alerting
** XMLRPC-based API and powerful CLI

XCP-unstable development has been happening in parallel with the stabilization of XCP 0.5 and there are lots of cool new features in the pipeline.

What’s coming next in XCP-unstable:
* automatic weekly builds on xen.org
* xen 4.0
* linux 2.6.32
* libxenlight integration
* new vhd-based storage management service
* local disk storage optimizations
* DRBD integration
* network performance improvements
* improved support for boot-from-SAN (including multipath)