Software update: Xen 4.0

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. For more information about Xen and its community, we refer you to this and this pages. Currently only Linux and NetBSD are supported as host systems, but work is underway to fully support other operating systems, such as Solaris. The developers have released Xen 4.0 with the following announcement:

Xen.org Announces Xen 4.0 Availability

Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen® hypervisor, today announced the 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.

Ian Pratt, founder and chairman of Xen.org
“The explosion of cloud computing in the industry and increasing demands from enterprise customers are the driving force behind the continued technology advancement of the Xen community. The Xen hypervisor already powers most of the world’s largest clouds and our customer base expects the Xen community to set the pace in virtualization infrastructure. Xen 4.0 delivers on these expectations.”

The complete press release is here.