Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the immediate availability of Xen 4.0, the most advanced open source hypervisor software available.
The release is the collective effort of a global development team representing more than 50 leading technology vendors, universities, and virtualization experts. Leveraging the latest network cards optimized for virtualization, Xen 4.0 provides users substantial performance and scalability gains for any level of enterprise or cloud application workload.
Xen 4.0 adds significant memory and security optimizations that will drive virtualization infrastructure to an entirely new class of performance. As a result, virtualization is made suitable for all workloads, even network intensive and high performance computing applications that would have previously experienced compromised performance on any hypervisor. Xen 4.0 enables virtualization to be deployed ubiquitously, across every server in a datacenter, bringing ease of management, secure architecture, high availability, agility and efficiency to all applications.
Key Facts and Highlights
- Fault Tolerance – Xen 4.0 now supports live transactional synchronization of VM states between physical servers as a basic component, enabling administrators to guarantee a high degree of service reliability without requiring additional software solutions.
- High Availability – Xen 4.0 leverages the advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features in new Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors.
- Netchannel2 – Xen 4.0’s NetChannel2 takes full advantage of significant advancements in networking hardware such as SMART NICs with multi-queue and SR-IOV functionality, which provides virtualization infrastructure with superior data processing capabilities.
- Blktap2 – A new virtual hard disk (VHD) implementation in Xen 4.0 delivers high performance VM snapshots and cloning features as well as the ability to do live virtual disk snapshots without stopping a VM process.
- PVOps Domain 0 – Xen 4.0 is the first release from Xen.org to formally support PVOps in the Domain0 (Dom0) Linux kernel; this new kernel option allows administrators access to the most recent devices supported by the Linux kernel.
- Memory Enhancements – New algorithms, such as Transcendent Memory and Page Sharing have been introduced in Xen 4.0 to enhance the performance and capabilities of the hypervisor memory operations.
- A full list of features can be found on the Xen Community web site
Xen 4.0 is available for immediate download from the Xen community site: http://xen.org/.
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