Xen 3.3 hypervisor released

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A State of Xen: Virtualization from PDAs to Super Computers

New Xen 3.3 Hypervisor Features Cross Platform Support, Industry Leading
Performance, Secure Design and New Features for Embedded Virtualization,
All Supported by a Robust and Growing Community 

CAMBRIDGE, U.K. - August 27, 2008 - Xen.org, the home of the open source
Xen project, has announced the release of Xen(r) 3.3 engine, the latest
version of the industry's leading open source hypervisor. The release is
now available for download from the Xen.org community site and is the
product of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from
more than 50 leading hardware, software, and security vendors (see end
of release for supporting comments from some of these vendors).  Xen 3.3
includes enhancements that further advance its position as a fast,
scalable, secure virtualization engine for the industry's broadest range
of server and PC chipsets - from super computers to PDAs.  

Since the first release of Xen in December 2005, Xen-based products have
quickly gained market share, accounting for almost a fifth of servers
virtualized to date.  

"The Xen.org community has made security and performance key criteria
for the evolution of Xen," said Zeus Kerravala, SVP, Enterprise
Research, Yankee Group.  "This has been a successful strategy, according
to recent Yankee Group survey data showing Xen's rapid growth."

The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with an array of advanced new
features and designs to further improve overall performance of the
hypervisor engine in mainstream enterprise computing environments.
Intel's continued contribution to the Xen project, for example, is
driving parallel advances in hardware and software virtualization
capabilities to ensure that Xen-based solutions take full advantage of
next-generation microprocessor technologies.  "At Intel, we continue to
enable Xen to take advantage of the advancements in Intel Virtualization
Technologies and other platform capabilities," said Imad Sousou,
Director of Intel Open Source Technology Center. "Xen 3.3 is optimized
for Intel's next generation micro-architecture Nehalem features;
enhanced power management, performance, I/O and networking features for
building flexible resource management solutions in an energy-efficient
data center."

 

Highest Performance and Lowest Cost for Large Data Centers

The Xen 3.3 engine offers best in class performance for both server and
desktop workloads with the highest degree of multiplexing, providing
users with the tools to achieve lower hardware costs per virtual
machine, with the additional benefit of optimal power usage per server -
making it an ideal choice for large data center virtualization
deployments. In addition, Xen utilizes both hardware and software
techniques to enable it to virtualize both current and legacy operating
systems with industry-leading performance.  As a result, its
architecture has significantly influenced the design of all modern
operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Solaris, which gain
performance and security from Xen's groundbreaking "para-virtualization"
approach.  Xen is also superbly matched with leading x86 hardware
features for virtualization, to support both legacy and future
workloads.

"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."

Availability

Xen 3.3 is available now.  For more information, please visit
www.xen.org <http://www.xen.org> .

About The Xen Project and Xen.org

Xen.org is the home of the open source Xen(r) hypervisor, a fast, secure
industry standard code base for operating system virtualization. Founded
and led by Ian Pratt, the community benefits from the contributions of
senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software, and
security vendors.  Xen.org is run for the benefit of the community by
the Xen Project Advisory board, which is drawn from leading contributors
to the project.  For more information, visit www.xen.org.

 

Xen(r) is a trademark of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its
subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office and in other countries.  Oracle is a registered trademark of
Oracle and/or its affiliates.   All other trademarks and registered
trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Xen.org Community Quotes:

"Xen 3.3 is addressing an important need to further performance and
security for commercialized industry solutions," said Margaret Lewis,
director, Commercial Solutions, AMD.  "We applaud Xen.org's efforts to
fully leverage the support of the Xen community, and we look forward to
continuing to support the development of the Xen code." 

 

"The Xen project is a great success story of the open source movement,"
said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix
Systems.  "It just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in
virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems - and in the same
period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero,
allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.  Customers
should be aware that simply having a hypervisor is not a value
proposition in itself, and that they can now freely choose from multiple
vendors that offer powerful value-added features that deliver a secure,
available and dynamic virtual data center.  The community's commitment
to a single open source reference standard for virtualization is
extremely powerful, and we all owe a debt to those who have contributed
to Xen's success." 

 

"Fujitsu is proud of our contribution to the development of Xen 3.3
which marks another step forward in the evolution of the Xen
hypervisor," said Shuichi Hasegawa, general manager of Linux Software
Development Division at Fujitsu.  "We recognize the growing importance
of highly scalable and secure virtualization technology in enterprises
today. To this end, Fujitsu is also excited to be the key sponsor at the
first Xen Summit in Tokyo later this year."

 

"IBM is a strong supporter of the open source community and has a long
history with virtualization, having invented it for mainframe over 40
years ago," said Rich Lechner, Vice President, IBM Enterprise Systems &
Cloud Computing Strategy.  "With that background, IBM is pleased to work
with Xen as a key partner, particularly as our clients continue moving
to highly-virtualized environments and cloud computing."

 

"Neocleus is excited to be working with Xen.org on the development of
Xen 3.3 and to contribute hypervisor enhancements in order to deliver
the most powerful hypervisor engine available to the market," said Etay
Bogner, co-founder and chief technology officer, Neocleus.  "Customers
will benefit from the collaborative work Xen is doing across the
industry and we look forward to our continued work together." 

 

"Oracle uses Xen as part of Oracle(r) VM.  Our active participation in
the Xen.org community and its thorough release process allows us to
remain in lockstep with the release schedule," said Wim Coekaerts, vice
president Linux Engineering, Oracle.  "The timely Xen 3.3 release, with
the inclusion of the new memory features Oracle contributed to the
community, is an example of our strong working relationship."

 

"The formation of Xen.org has provided a great opportunity for community
players to contribute integrated feature sets and ecosystem support
enabling enhanced VM assurance, security, IT process controls and VM
lifecycle management," says Wyatt Starnes, Founder and CEO of SignaCert,
Inc.  "The addition of critical performance and scalability features to
Xen will dramatically increase customer confidence in virtualized
computing."

 

"Samsung Electronics has made contributions to Xen community by
releasing the first Xen hypervisor to virtualize an ARM CPU-based mobile
platform and enhance the security," said Sang-bum Suh, PhD,
Virtualization Project Lead and Principal Engineer, Samsung Electronics.
"Samsung will actively lead the Xen-ARM architecture.  This indicates
that using the Xen architecture becomes pervasive to Consumer
Electronics devices." 

 

"Sun is using code developed by the Xen community as part of our
commercial xVM Server and OpenSolaris products," said Steve Wilson, vice
president, xVM, Sun Microsystems.  "We're pleased to be contributors to
the Xen community, and look forward to continued collaboration in the
future."

 

Citrix(r) is a trademark of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of
its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office and in other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of
Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All other trademarks and registered
trademarks are property of their respective owners.

 

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