Xen.org : Hypervisor new release 4.0
For those who thought that the Xen opensource project was at a standstill or in agony, here we are at the 4.0 release of the hypervisor with great news. We will also describe a series of important news about the Xen Client Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) projects.
The new features of version 4.0 of the Xen Hypervisor are:
- Blktap2 – new implementation of the virtual hard disk (VHD) with increased performance, snapshots and cloning.
- Fault Tolerance – probably a release of a study that we already mentioned in an old post about the kemari project. System administrators can now ensure a higher degree of SLA. Who knows if Citrix will now abandon Marathon to use this feature at no cost?
- Netchannel2 – Support for new NICs with SR-IOV capabilities and improvements on throughput and scalability
- Page Sharing – Only for HVM Copy-on Write Sharing of identical memory pages between VMs
- Libxenlight – A new C library for Xen control
- Kernel Support – PVOps Dom0 supported. Provides the ability to select recent linux kernels that support recent devices
- Transcendental Memory – New algorithms that improve the performance and capacity of hypervisor memory operations. Unused memory from paravirtualized VMs is immediately and effectively reallocated to where needed. This allows multiple VMs to sharare pages of memory in common, reducing power consumption.
- PV-USB and VGA pass-through
- 64 vcpus per VM and 1 TB RAM per host
The new version can be installed by simply downloading a LiveCD from the Xen.org website which has several features. For those interested there is an official Italian forum on Xen.
To understand the Xen Client Iniziative XCI we refer to an old post that talked about the roadmap to version 3.4. A demo video gives you an idea of the potential of a bare-metal client hypervisor.
The Xen Cloud Platform XCP project is on the revolutionary side and has the numbers to compete as the Xen Hypervisor is estimated to have 20% of the virtualization market and about 100% of the existing cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2, RackSpace, GoGrid). The project announced in August 2009 aims to create a complete open solution that enables other open source projects such as Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, OpenXenCenter, Xen VNC Proxy, Convirture and Nimbus
