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Update: Xen 4.1.1 Maintenance Release

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The Xen.org community has announced that there is a new maintenance release of Xen available, version 4.1.1. It includes the following changes:

– Security fixes including CVE-2011-1583 CVE-2011-1898

– Enhancements to guest introspection (VM single stepping support for very fine-grained access control)

– Many stability improvements, such as: PV-on-HVM stability fixes (fixing some IRQ issues), XSAVE cpu feature support for PV guests (allows safe use of latest multimedia instructions), RAS fixes for high availability, fixes for offlining bad pages and changes to libxc, mainly of benefit to libvirt

– Compatibility fixes for newer Linux guests, newer compilers, some old guest savefiles, newer Python, grub2, some hardware/BIOS bugs.

Xen Releases Cloud Platform (XCP) 1.0

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Xen.org, home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the availability of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) 1.0.

Developed as part of the Xen Cloud Project introduced in 2009, XCP 1.0 provides a solution for small and medium size enterprises looking to build private clouds, as well as open source enthusiasts, universities and researchers wanting to experiment with cloud computing.

It represents a shift in enterprise usability for Xen.org, which has traditionally released software as source code only. X

XCP is an open source server virtualization platform in a single, tested installable image that features the Xen hypervisor, network and storage support, a management stack and tools, as well as support for a range of guest operating systems including Windows and Linux.

XCP 1.0 includes a fully featured, enterprise-class Xen API Management tool stack with features such as disaster recovery support, security, real-time performance monitoring, support for multi-host resource pools, and upgrade and patching capabilities.

XCP 1.0 provides support for virtual networking capabilities via Open vSwitch and a range of open source GUI management tools.

The Xen community will also be enabled to test features with XCP 1.0 that could offer future value to enterprise products such as Citrix XenServer and Citrix OpenCloud.

Xen 3.4 Released

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Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor (3.4), which is is referring to as “the open source industry standard for virtualization”.

From the blog post:

“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.

Xen Summit North America 2009

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The Xen.org community and Oracle are proud to announce the first major Xen event for 2009, Xen Summit North America at Oracle, February 24 – 25, 2009 at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood City, CA.

Global leaders developing for and using the open source Xen hypervisor will meet for 2 days of highly interactive discussion on product roadmaps, new features, and all things Xen related. With the increased
emphasis on the Xen Client Initiative, expect significant discussions on the port for the Xen hypervisor to all types of client devices.

Registration is only $215 and more event details are available at Xen.org. Included in the fee is an evening out at the Computer History Museum and other Xen Summit firsts!

If you have any questions, please contact Stephen Spector ([email protected]) for more information.

Xen 3.3.0 Available For Download

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A recent post on the Xen blog featured a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the (back then upcoming) Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month. Now Xen 3.3.0 is here and ready for download, as reported by Heise Online.

The new version is also available as part of a package with a 2.6.18 kernel version of Linux as the host system, also known as Domain 0 (Dom0). According to Xen developers, the number of supported guest operating systems has grown and there are improvements in performance, the ACPI power management modes, and security functions such as using PVGrub instead of PYGrub. Xen 3.3.0 also has fewer limitations on moving running virtual machines from one physical system to another. This function, necessary for redundant fail over configurations and practical for server maintenance, has previously only been usable when the processors (and chipsets) running on the physical machines involved supported very similar hardware virtualization functions.

SourceLabs Adds Support For Xen In Self-Support Suite

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SourceLabs, provider of technology to support open source software, today announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the Xen hypervisor.

SourceLabs’ Self-Support technology aims to give developers, corporate IT pros and solution
providers an on-demand way to reduce the complexity of application development, deployment, troubleshooting and software maintenance for open source technologies.

“As data centers are moving toward a more dynamic model, they are increasingly doing so using server virtualization technology and Xen is the leading technology solution in the market today for running virtualized IT environments,” said Byron Sebastian, SourceLabs CEO and Founder. “The SourceLabs Self- Support Suite gives developers the ability to significantly drive down the costs of deploying and maintaining virtualized data centers with technology that seamlessly and effortlessly harnesses the power of Xen and other open source technologies.”

SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite identifies issues and ranks potential resolutions from across a wide variety of projects in the open source development ecosystem. Indexing, managing, and storing the data, SourceLabs uses advanced pattern matching and predictive analysis algorithms to automate troubleshooting, reduces the time on routine tasks and analyzes data to flag any potential problems before they can impact systems or designs.

SourceLabs’ supports all current and previous releases of Xen technology, including auxiliary projects
such as ‘libvirt.’ SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite for Xen references solutions from Xen.org as well as
solutions from across multiple Linux distributions that ship with Xen integration including Debian,
RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSuSE, as well as the Linux Kernel mailing list and bug database,
providing Xen users an exhaustive resource for troubleshooting and analysis of their virtualization
platforms. SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite supports the most popular open source Java and Linux
technologies including Apache httpd, GCC, MySQL, Sendmail, and the Linux Kernel among others.

Basic support includes 24×7 global coverage and is available from $399 for one developer seat.