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.”

Simon Crosby, CTO, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“Xen has become the most scalable and secure hypervisor in the industry, running the largest clouds with the best price performance while enabling customers to differentiate above the line.  The new advancements in Xen 4.0  will bring cloud and virtualization to new levels, and Citrix is dedicated to applying them across our entire stack – from  desktop virtualization to cloud computing.”

Doug Fisher, vice president of the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Systems Software Division, Intel Corporation (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“Intel has been a committed and active contributor to the Xen project since its inception. By taking advantage of advanced features in the Intel® Xeon® architecture to provide server high availability, power efficiency and hardware assisted virtualization; delivering SRIOV to improve both bare metal network and storage performance; and supporting multiple cores to achieve increased virtual machine density, we see Xen 4.0 being an outstanding release for the Xen community.”

Chiseki Sagawa, President of Service Oriented Platform Strategy & Development Office, Fujitsu Limited (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“The release of Xen 4.0 is truly exciting news to Fujitsu.  Combining the reliability and security enhancements of the new release and Fujitsu’s commitment to open source based cloud computing, we are confident that we can bring yet an even higher level of benefits to our cloud computing customers.”

Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of Business and Product Management, Novell (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“As the first enterprise Linux vendor to ship and support the Xen hypervisor, Novell is pleased to bring Xen 4.0 to market within SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.  With its impressive performance and scalability improvements, Xen 4.0 will allow Novell customers to achieve high consolidation ratios and significant cost savings for even the most mission-critical workloads. This release is a major step toward enabling fully dynamic and flexible data centers and clouds, supporting Novell’s strategy to deliver leading intelligent workload management solutions. We look forward to shipping Xen 4.0 in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 this quarter.”

Wim Coekarts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“As a long-time member of the Xen Advisory Board, Oracle is committed to enhancing the enterprise features in Xen with every release. With features like “tmem” that allow for significant memory advancements and improved virtual machine consolidation, Oracle’s contributions continue to deliver on the scalability and stability needed for enterprise applications when deployed in a virtual environment.”

Iehisa “Ike” Nakamura, president and CEO, VA Linux Japan (Xen Advisory Board Member)
“The new functionality of Xen 4.0 Hypervisor represents an excellent opportunity to support our clients. As a Xen.org advisory board member, VA Linux is pleased to be involved in the I/O performance improvement of this latest version.  We expect that Xen 4.0 Hypervisor will be a significant advancement for the enterprise and cloud. VA Linux continues to deliver high-quality consulting services for the Xen virtualization technology in Japan.”

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 (Nehalem-EX) 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

Related Announcements
Xen Project Launches New Open Cloud Initiative: Introduction of Xen Cloud Platform Will Accelerate Customer Adoption of Open Enterprise-Class Cloud Infrastructures

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