Xen 2.0 Virtual Machine Monitor Released

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."

Comments

Alas, no Windows...

[October_30th]

A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of Xen, but is not available for release due to licensce restrictions

Sigh... how hard would it be to get a license and distribute it as a binary-only module to people like me who'd be willing to pay for it? I'm sure it'd still be less expensive than the existing alternatives.

Otherwise this looks very nice. In fact, I didn't know that there was such a mature free virtual machine available.

Re:Alas, no Windows...

[Frasier]

Sigh... how hard would it be to get a license and distribute it as a binary-only module to people like me who'd be willing to pay for it?

Microsoft has their own virtual server product. They propably do not want competition, especially something that allows one to run Windows XP and Linux on the same machine at the same time.

I would personally love to have access to a Windows system without having to dedicate entire machine for it. But Microsoft has not, is not, and propably will not show any signs of willingness to cooperate with non-Microsoft systems.

Re:Alas, no Windows...

[bairy]

MS's virtual server allows linux distro's. See my other comment here

64 bit?

[gr8_phk]

Does it work with AMD64? How about with one 64 and one 32 bit OS? The FAQ just says "x86".

Re:And the point of this application is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a couple ISPs and datacenters are already working on using Xen for this exact purpose.

http://xen.terrabox.com will be back online in the next 72 hours. You can find a wiki about xen there. One page is available for listing of any companies that offer Xen based virtual servers. So far the customers that i have setup under Xen have been quite impresed with the speed and stability as compared to the traditional virtualized and meta-virtualied linux vhost setups. :)

This is a VM platform, not a VMWare competitor

[ites]

Big difference. VMWare is about virtualising a foreign OS. Since VMWare abstracts at the BIOS and hardware level it can run almost all OSes the CPU will support but it takes a large performance hit.

Xen is a VM platform, i.e. it lets you set up multiple virtual machines that run with very little extra overhead. A lot like User Mode Linux, except easier to configure and install.

Here's a typical use case: you want to make a network "security box" that includes firewall, proxy, web server, email, wiki, irc. Now, conventionally you put all these services in the same Linux system (or whatever OS you use). Using Xen you run all of the services in their own virtual machine, so that if the firewall gets compromised, for instance, an attacker cannot get access to other parts of your system.

It's a very useful tool.

Oh, another use case I just thought of too: how about a 'hidden' Linux OS on your Windows box that does all your email, browsing, and other Internet work that you want to keep secure. Click the icon, up pops Mozilla, except it's running in a different virtual OS.

Yup, definitely very useful.

Re:This is a VM platform, not a VMWare competitor

[gtrubetskoy]

Here's a typical use case: you want to make a network "security box" that includes firewall, proxy, web server, email, wiki, irc.

My preference for this would be Linux VServer or jails on BSD which have practically no overhead. Xen would only be useful if the requirement is to run different OS's on the same machine.

Absolutely cool tech!

[a_hofmann]

GPLed virtualization software that according to the benchmarks achieves performance unseen in current approaches - sounds like a dream come true.

It would be astonishing if those benchmark numbers hold true in a production environment, which might well be as the selected benchmarks (SPECint, Postgres, Apache, ..) should give a fair picture of the overall performance hit for the virtualized systems.

Being able to partition your OS without serious performance implication would open a whole lot of new possibilities for developers that previously where only possible with huge investments in high-end hardware and expensive virtualization software licenses.

I've already decided: My price for the most useful opensourced application in 2004 goes to..... Xen :)

Re:It's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Couple of changes at VMware you might be interested in:

1) VMware workstation is now a lot cheaper (I believe around ~$150).

2) In the new 5.0 version, I believe they've switched to using Xvidmode instead of DGA (at least, that's what the current 5.0 beta is using).

Xen vs. User Mode Linux

[arete]

I'm looking to do exactly what User Mode Linux claims to be for, but it seems like Xen does it too. Which is more reliable? Faster? Easier to install?

Basically I want just slightly more functionality than a chroot jail - I want to be able to run a service on a virtual filesystem (ie, a filesystem that exists as a file) with an linux OS version that may vary from the host OS (ie, I can upgrade one service without having to do them all at the same time) I want a compromise of one service to have minimum security implications for the others. And I want to be able to move a service/virtualmachine from one physical machine to another with a minimum of hassle.

Thanks in advance!