“Xen has become an open source industry standard for virtualization because it leads the industry in performance and support for leading server and PC systems,” said Ian Pratt, creator of Xen and founder of Xen.org. “Our open development model, support for industry standard management APIs and our open, active engagement with the security community to secure the hypervisor ensure that Xen continues to outclass proprietary hypervisors. Xen 3.3 further extends our community’s lead through significant performance, efficiency and security enhancements and through groundbreaking features for embedded Xen implementations on PCs, laptops and PDAs.”

Xen has also become a standard infrastructure component in many of the largest and fastest-growing ‘cloud’ service providers, and was recently awarded the prestigious InfoWorld 2008 Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) award for server virtualization.

From Super Computers to PDAs
Xen 3.3 offers a scalable virtualization engine that leverages a broad range of server and PC chipsets - from super computers to PDAs. It provides highly efficient virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with leading CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, making Xen-based products a natural choice for the latest server, client and PDA hardware. Xen supports many-core CPU architectures, allowing dense consolidation of virtualized workloads on the latest CPUs as well as large numbers of virtual CPUs per virtual machine. With a full 64-bit address space, Xen can take advantage of massive amounts of physical memory, including new flash-memory based stores, and Xen’s memory ballooning features permit dynamic reallocation of memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs), to guarantee performance, and permit greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 now offers CPU portability to allow live relocation of VMs across different CPU feature sets, active power optimization, to reduce power consumption on Xen-based servers and maximize data center power savings, and significantly enhanced security.

Xen 3.3 also contains a wealth of new features contributed by vendors collaborating in the new Xen Client Initiative (XCI), a Xen.org community effort to accelerate and coordinate the development of fast, free, compatible embedded Xen hypervisors for laptops, PCs and PDAs. The XCI is targeting three use cases: using Xen to run “embedded IT” VMs that allow remote support, security and service of PCs through embedded IT applications without any impact on the user’s primary desktop OS; “instant on” applications that can be immediately available as separate VMs from the user’s primary desktop OS; and “application compatibility” VMs, which allow legacy PC applications to run as VMs, alongside the user’s primary desktop OS. XCI member companies are already shipping Xen client hypervisors embedded in chipsets, PCs and laptops.

A Vibrant and Growing Xen Community
Xen.org benefits from broad industry support in the development of the Xen hypervisor, with more than 50 major IT vendors, 14 universities and developers from 12 countries participating in the project’s development effort. In addition to its growing development community, Xen-based solutions have been delivered to market by numerous vendors, including Amazon Web Services, Citrix, Fujitsu, Intel, Lenovo, Neocleus, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Virtual Iron, and are available as an embedded option at point of sale on most leading x86 server platforms.

“By using the Xen hypervisor included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, our customers obtain real business value with better use of hardware and significant reductions in maintenance and licensing costs,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of outbound product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell. “Novell plans to include the latest version of the Xen hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which will feature support for cross-platform virtualization and quality of service for dynamic resources.”

For more information on Xen.org contact Julie Geer, julie.geer@citrix.com at Citrix Systems.