The Xen Project community, a Collaborative Project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced it recently helped kickstart the new CentOS Virtualization Special Interest Group (Virt SIG)  open to developers contributing to any server virtualization technology.

As the new CentOS Project expands to meet the needs of community users through SIGs, Xen Project members will coordinate and chair the Virt SIG. This builds on efforts started last year when Xen Project and CentOS developers began collaborating on the Xen4CentOS Project to enable users to easily migrate to CentOS 6.

"The Xen Project community has already strengthened our value with our users intent on virtualizing their environments and moving to the cloud," said Karanbir Singh, the CentOS Project lead. "The Xen Project team will be an asset as we work toward a common platform, embrace new virtualization software and deliver a full-featured, easy-to-use environment. We expect other SIGs will model Xen4CentOS' hybrid approach to enhance CentOS Linux and 3rd party projects."

In addition to its participation with Xen4CentOS, Xen Project developers currently work with the following community distributions: OpenSuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and the Berkeley Software Distributions.

"Linux users want a smooth out-of-the-box experience when running VMs," said Lars Kurth, chairman of the Xen Project Advisory Board. "We're excited to work with CentOS Project members to make this new SIG as technologically inclusive as possible so that the benefits of virtualization will easily and quickly reach new users. This work, alongside the support we already provide to many other popular Linux distributions, is critical to accelerating Xen Project installations."

The Virtualization SIG's mission is to deliver CentOS Linux variants for any number of relevant technologies. For instance, developers working with container technologies, writing storage interfaces behind hypervisors, providing new versions of qemu, adding more support to the libvirt toolkit or building a trimmed down kernel are encouraged to join and contribute to the Virt SIG. In addition to integrating, packaging, and maintaining Virt technologies for the CentOS Project, the SIG will also be responsible for the Xen4CentOS Project.

Through the new SIGs, participants are now able to extend and create customized variations in the CentOS Project to serve specific user communities such as virtualization, cloud, or storage software.

CentOS Linux is a popular community distribution with many large cloud providers using the Xen Project hypervisor. One of the first community Linux distributions to offer a Xen Project implementation, the two technologies are widely deployed in cloud, embedded, and high-performance computing.

For more information or to join the Virtualization SIG go to: http://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Virtualization