Virtualization efforts on Linux got a major boost today with the
open source release of Xen 3.0.
In conjunction with the new release, Xen’s commercial sponsor XenSource is also rolling out an
application to help manage virtualization in enterprise data
centers.
Xen 3.0 is expected to make its way into
Red Hat and
Novell’s SUSE enterprise Linux distributions, as well as
Solaris 10, thereby
providing an open source alternative to VMware and other proprietary
virtualization tools.
Xen 3.0 includes numerous improvements over its predecessor, which was
released a year ago and has since benefited from the
involvement of IBM,
among others.
SMP
guests has been added to Xen, allowing it to take full advantage of the high
end of enterprise deployments. Memory addressing has also been improved with
64-bit servers able to address up to 8TB of memory and 32-bit up to 4GB.
It also boasts “near native performance” that allows it to run with a
virtualization overhead of between 0.1 percent and 3.5 percent for a paravirtualized
guest.
Xen 3.0 also supports hardware virtualization technology, including
Intel’s VT-x virtualization technology and the upcoming AMD
Pacifica.
Sitting on top of Xen 3.0 is XenOptimizer, a commercial management tool
from XenSource that enables the automatic provisioning of Xen virtual
servers and provides a management dashboard for full control of the
virtualized environments.
According to Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, Xen is all about better and
more efficient server utilizations. Xen offers the promise of getting more
out of each server without requiring data centers to buy additional boxes.
“For every dollar that you don’t spend on a box, you save another five or six
in operating expenses,” Crosby told internetnews.com.
Virtualization is something that users want, he added, but it hasn’t necessarily
helped back the adoption of Linux overall.
“People want virtualization. They just don’t
want to pay a vast amount of money for it and they don’t want to buy into
yet another proprietary feature set.”
