Xen 3.0 provides vastly improved stability and a wealth of new features. Xen 3.0 also supports unmodified operating systems and enterprise hardware. Here’s a look at the latest version– one that’s ready for production environments.
In the past year, development of the open source Xen virtualization platform (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen/) has forged ahead at a rapid pace, adding support for hardware virtualization and large- scale enterprise server hardware such as symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) guests and physical address extensions (PAE). Simultaneously, the Xen project has amassed a substantial community of developers and refined the software to be stable and robust. Now with a third major release, Xen is ready for “The Big Show,” production use.
Up until the recent release of Xen 3.0, a major obstacle to the adoption of Xen in some environments was the software’s lack of support for unmodified operating systems. Xen’s original approach of paravirtualization, modifying an operating system to facilitate virtualization, yielded great performance, but failed to host operating systems for which source code is unavailable.
Fortunately, with the launch of new x86 CPUs that provide hardware support for virtualization– Intel’s VT extensions and AMD’s SVM both provide on-chip support for creating virtualized processor contexts– unmodified operating systems can now be hosted on Xen. In fact, developers from the Intel Open Source Technology Center have been working diligently with the Xen source over the past year and have incorporated support for VT into the Xen tree. The Intel team recently announced the ability to host unmodified Linux kernels above Xen.
Hardware support for virtualization is not a panacea, though. While necessary to host unmodified operating systems, CPU extensions require software support….
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