The upcoming release of Xen 3.3 is near and the Xen Community is sharing some of the latest features for review. The open source Xen hypervisor continues to attack the challenges being faced in the virtualization community. One of the important value propositions of Xen is that it is open source and free to the community at large. Companies like Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, SUSE, and Oracle are a few of the big name companies in the industry that are building virtualization platforms and applications around and on top of the technology. And Xen is also backed by more than 20 enterprise infrastructure vendors such as Intel, AMD, Dell, HP and IBM.When going up against companies like VMware and Microsoft, it is sometimes difficult to get your message across. However, the Xen community is pushing forward, and they have recently announced a set of new features for the next hypervisor release, version 3.3.Xen 3.3 provides CPU portability by enabling administrators to move active virtual machines from one server to another — independent of various CPU virtualization support. The new version also plans to take advantage of the latest hardware support for power consumption monitoring. It will help “green computing” by being able to intelligently power down components within an individual processor and by offering virtualization solutions that can manage servers and server farms for greater power savings. Power saving issues are becoming a huge boon for virtualization. VMware and Virtual Iron have both recently offered their own power saving technologies within each of their products.Security within virtualization is also being pushed up the watch list. Xen 3.3 delivers new solutions to better secure virtual machine start-up as well as reduce possible hacking opportunities by moving critical management processing out of global space into separate virtual sessions.And to help address performance and scalability issues, Xen 3.3 will offer new memory access algorithms to help reduce system wait time during critical memory requests, and it offers new scanning technology to optimize framebuffer searches. Several scalability enhancements were also implemented including 2MB page support for EPT/NPT. “We believe Xen 3.3 marks a significant step forward in the overall performance of our open source hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder and project chairman of Xen.org. “This new release is consistent with our vision of providing a highly scalable and secure open source engine which is increasingly becoming an industry standard.” Software Development