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Xen 2.0 Virtual Machine Monitor Released

Posted by michael on from the xen-and-the-art-of-system-maintenance dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0, the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor. Xen enables you to run multiple operating systems images concurrently on the same hardware, securely partitioning the resources of the machine between them. Xen uses a technique called 'para-virtualization' to achieve very low performance overhead -- typically just a few percent relative to native. This new release provides kernel support for Linux 2.4.27/2.6.9 and NetBSD, with FreeBSD and Plan9 to follow in the next few weeks. Xen 2.0 runs on almost the entire set of modern x86 hardware supported by Linux, and is easy to 'drop-in' to an existing Linux installation. The new release has a lot more flexibility in how guest OS virtual I/O devices are configured. For example, you can configure arbitrary firewalling, bridging and routing of guest virtual network interfaces, and use copy-on-write LVM volumes or loopback files for storing guest OS disk images. Another new feature is 'live migration', which allows running OS images to be moved between nodes in a cluster without having to stop them. Visit the Xen homepage for downloads and documentation."

7 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Since we all love screenshots... by Zemplar · · Score: 5, Informative

    Direct link: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/scr eenshots/index.html

  2. Re:And the point of this application is.. by grub · · Score: 5, Informative


    Let's assume you're an ISP and have a few big machines on the racks. Your customers don't want or need that much horsepower but want their webserver (which you maintain) to run under Linux, or NetBSD, or FreeBSD, or whatever.. You can do it.

    Let's assume you're a developer and want to test your code under various OSs, now you can do it on the same box in realtime (read: no reboots)

    The list goes on and on, it's a great technology.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  3. Great for free "UX's" but not for Win32 by slashnik · · Score: 5, Informative

    from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/faq .html

    1.3 Which OSes run on Xen?
    To achieve such high performance, Xen requires that OSes are ported to run on it. So far we have stable ports of Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, and NetBSD. Ports of FreeBSD and Plan 9 are nearing completion.

  4. Re:64 bit? by julesh · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the manual:

    A port specifically for x86/64 is in progress, although Xen already runs on such systems in 32-bit legacy mode

  5. Not as cool. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the FAQ, it states that you can only run OS's ported to it. While this might be great for cluster testing, or software design, this is defintely no VMware replacement. I am slightly disappointed in this, but I can see where it has its place.

  6. Re:Alas, no Windows... by julesh · · Score: 4, Informative

    VMware developers must have bought a license, so what's the problem here?

    VMware runs an unmodified version of Windows by presenting a virtual machine that is practically indistinguishable from a real PC. Therefore they don't need a license.

  7. QEMU by nns6561 · · Score: 4, Informative

    QEMU is a similar open source project. It's supposed to run unmodified versions of Windows even. Does anybody know what QEMU's lastest performance numbers are?