Software update: Xen 3.1

Xen is a virtual machine hypervisor for the x86 platform and allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single system without drastically impacting performance. Who wants to know how the developers conceived and designed Xen can on this page read the documentation. Currently only Linux and NetBSD are supported as operating systems but other companies are working hard to support other operating systems such as Solaris. The developers have released Xen 3.1 with the following announcement on the mailing list:

folk,

We’re pleased to announce the official release of Xen 3.1!

This represents a major milestone in the Xen project containing performance and stability enhancements, additional features for all architectures, and a brand new management API. Highlights of this release include:

• XenAPI 1.0 support
  • XML configuration files for virtual machines;
  • VM life cycle management operations; and
  • Secure on- or off-box XML-RPC with bindings for many languages
• Preliminary save/restore/migrate support for HVM (eg Windows) VMs;
• Dynamic memory control for HVM guests;
• 32-on-64 PV guest support (run PAE PV VMs on a 64-bit Xen!); and
• Blktap copy on write disk support.

You can get the source using mercurial from:
http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.1-testing.hg

Source and binary tarballs, and RPMs, are available from:

cheers,
Keir (on behalf of the whole Xen dev team)