If you weren't able to make the fall Xen Summit in November of 2007, don't worry, you can catch up on the presentations that were given at this event by downloading them from the xen.org Web site. Ian Pratt, leader and chief architect of the Xen project, did a presentation titled "Xen Project Status" where he discussed among other things, the Xen project status and roadmap. One of the things I learned more about If you weren’t able to make the fall Xen Summit in November of 2007, don’t worry, you can catch up on the presentations that were given at this event by downloading them from the xen.org Web site.Ian Pratt, leader and chief architect of the Xen project, did a presentation titled “Xen Project Status” where he discussed among other things, the Xen project status and roadmap.One of the things I learned more about while at the Citrix iForum was the continued building of community around Xen. And in Ian’s Xen Summit presentation, he talked about the xen.org Web site and how all community related activities were being located and consolidated here. Things like Web site material, source repos, the wiki and bugzilla… with more to follow soon enough. The objectives of this site are to show the independence of the Xen project from any commercial organizations, offer better community tools and to foster independent oversight. After the Citrix acquisition of XenSource, many questioned what would happen to the open source Xen project. And like the xen.org Web site, the project itself is remaining independent, as is evident by the Xen Project Advisory Board, made up of the largest contributors and key vendors that deliver Xen in the market: Citrix, IBM, Intel, HP, Novell, Red Hat and Sun. The group is also responsible for defining procedures for evolving the group over time.The Xen Roadmap is also clearly defined in Ian’s presentation. It discusses the following: Server Performance and scalability optimizations Enable Smart IO devices SCSI pass-through Security Domain0 disaggregation; XSM Xen Security Modules Secure boot, TPM, certification, multi-level secure systems Client Power management: Suspend and hibernate; clock management 3D video: direct hardware access; high-performance guest virtualization USB device pass-through And perhaps equally important as the roadmap is the Xen Project’s overall Mission Statement which reads: Build the industry standard open source hypervisor: Core “engine” that is incorporated into multiple vendors’ products Maintain our industry-leading performance: Be first to exploit new hardware acceleration features and help OS vendors paravirtualize their OSes Maintain our reputation for stability and quality – Security must now be paramount Support multiple CPU types; big and small systems: From server to client to mobile Foster innovation: Be a great platform for research and experimentation Drive interoperability: Between Xen-based products and with other virtualization productsThe Xen Project and all the commercial implementations and applications around it are going to prove important in 2008. As virtualization continues to grow and expand, more companies are going to look to the open source solution and more vendors are going to jump on board as well.You can find this and other Xen Summit presentations, here. Software Development