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Xen 4.1 Hypervisor Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

LarsKurth writes "The Xen.org open source community just released a new version of the Xen Hypervisor, Xen 4.1. Feature highlights include a new prototype scheduler for latency-sensitive workloads, better support for very large systems (>255 CPUs, 1GB/2MB super page sizes), new security features, and many others. During the development cycle of Xen 4.1, the Xen community worked closely with upstream Linux projects to ensure that Xen dom0 support and Xen guest support are available from unmodified Linux distributions. The release announcement contains a full list of changes."

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't Xen dead? by ecliptik · · Score: 2

    Oracle is trying to enter the x86 virtualization market with Xen in a product called Oracle VM. I've used it, and it's ugly. Besides the PHB marketing tagling of "you can run Oracle on the entire stack!", I've seen no technical reasons to use it over KVM or VMWare in the enterprise.

  2. Re:Isn't Xen dead? by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

    Because they have not noticed that IBM abandoning them and KVM removing the need for them means they are dead. Give them time.

  3. Too much FUD. by PiSkyHi · · Score: 2
    14 Comments so far and no one seems to have read the Xen 4.1 wiki. Just to clarify, Xen and KVM are similar and you can use them for similar purposes. Xen 4.1 is aiming to be integrated into the native Kernel, it is very close already having some dom0 support now, native guest support as of 2.6.36 and will have full dom0 support soon. dom0 and domu kernels are now de-coupled, so things are going to become more generic which distributions will love.

    I tried and failed at Xen 4.0 after using Xen 3.x successfully sometime beforehand - I have been waiting for all those involved to update, stabilise and simplify Xen - looks like it is coming very soon.

    Redhat not using Xen for sometime now, fair enough, I'm not using Redhat so it won't bother me much.

  4. Re:Will Citrix take notice by drsmithy · · Score: 2

    I know another guy who used to say that. I showed him VB (free) and he was amazed by it. Maybe you should check it out.

    I assume you mean VirtualBox. Virtualbox is an OS-hosted end user virtualisation application. It's not even playing the same game as bare metal hypervisors like and Xen and VMware ESX.

  5. Re:Isn't Xen dead? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm pretty sure that Virtualbox and Xen are(in addition to architectural differences) aimed at substantially different uses of virtualization.

    Virtualbox, though there is nothing specifically stopping you from using it otherwise, is pretty much aimed at the "second and/or test OS on primary desktop" use case. Run whatever primary OS, run a small number of secondary OSes or virtual test boxes because RAM is cheaper than a rats nest of towers and KVM switches. This shows in the fairly simple configuration, easy support for peripheral-passthrough and graphical guest OS window, and lack of interest in things like automated guest migration.

    Xen, by contrast, is aimed much more at the "pool of VM servers supporting some large number of VM instances that are mostly there to interact over network only" style. Nothing prevents you from setting up your desktop as the dom0 OS, and using it like Virtualbox; but it would be a pain and not clearly beneficial. On the other hand, you get much more concern for large memory spaces, guest migration, and similar things.

    This isn't a precise analogy(since I suspect that they share somewhat more, just for cost reasons); but asking "Why use Xen when you could use Virtualbox?" is sort of like asking "Why use VMware ESX when you could use VMware Workstation?"