The Xen Project, a Collaborative Project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the availability of Xen Project hypervisor version 4.3.
The Xen Project powers more than 10 million users across enterprise and cloud computing in addition to embedded and mobile devices. Xen Project is backed by some of the largest names in computing including Amazon Web Services, AMD, Google, Oracle, Intel and many other hardware and hosting service providers. The Xen Project open source virtualization platform is licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel.
The investments the Xen Project has been making in further opening up development, culminating with the decision to be an independent Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation, have resulted in increased collaborative development and the inclusion of the following new capabilities and improvements in the Xen Project 4.3:
ARM server support: The new release includes support for ARM servers as a Technology Preview. The Xen Project community, working with ARM server hardware vendors including Calxeda, has validated the Xen ARM port on ARMv7 and ARMv8 platforms. Also, several vendors on the Xen Advisory Board are actively supporting Xen Project as part of the Linaro Enterprise Working Group.
Performance and scalability enhancements: NUMA scheduler affinity has led to significant performance improvements on NUMA hardware. Scalability improvements increased support for physical RAM on hosts from 5TB to 16TB of RAM. A tool stack bottleneck limitation to 300 virtual CPUs was removed and Xen Project has already been tested on up to 750 virtual CPUs. Finally, with block protocol scalability, users will see significant improvement in read/write performance and throughput with more than six guests on a single host.
Improved security
Consumability experience
Tool stack improvements
Power efficiency
"Virtualization is important to Linux and the open source community and the Xen Project is helping companies realize new levels of scalability and efficiency in areas such as cloud computing," said Mike Woster, chief operating officer and vice president at The Linux Foundation. "With the latest release of Xen Project, organizations can advance their cloud computing strategies to deliver on customer expectations for their enterprise environments."
