The open source Xen community is moving quickly to enhance the feature set of the Xen hypervisor technology Xen.org recently announced the release of a new version of its open-source hypervisor platform, Xen 3.3. The new version has added numerous enhancements to further the platform’s security, performance, and scalability.The release is now available for download from the Xen.org community site and is the product of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software, and security vendors.Xen has become a standard infrastructure component in many of the largest and fastest-growing “cloud” service providers, and was recently awarded the InfoWorld 2008 Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) award for server virtualization. Less than two weeks ago, I reported on the community’s list of proposed features for Xen 3.3. And now that Xen 3.3 is available for download, the community is already looking to the next version and asking for feature-set enhancement proposals for Xen 3.4.The following list is currently being proposed for Xen 3.4: Performance and Scalability netchannel2 for accelerated guest networking – including VMDQ, VT-c / SR-IOV / smart NIC support scheduler2 – better RT, HT; gang scheduling; domain co-sched; power awareness page sharing and delta compression 2MB page support for PV guests Manageability & Fault Tolerance Improved python XenAPI support (managed domains, CIM bindings) Better migration control protocol (including handshake, compat, rollback) VM checkpointing for h/w fault tolerance Machine check architecture support Native OVF support XCI (Xen Client Initiative) Client device virt (e.g. battery status etc) GPU virtualization with Gallium USB 2.0 support, PV USB support Trusted HID Simple VGA/text-mode management console Security Xen lockdown as standard (NODMA/DEV/VT-d etc) Trusted/attested boot “Page boxing” (confidential grants) Misc SCSI PV drivers moving from experimental to supported pv_ops dom0 linux kernel SATA command virtualizationThe community is asking for new feature ideas for Xen 3.4. If you have any, please submit them to the xen-devel mailing list.“The Xen project is a great success story of the open-source movement,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of the virtualization and management division at Citrix Systems. “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems, and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free. Customers should be aware that simply having a hypervisor is not a value proposition in itself, and that they can now freely choose from multiple vendors that offer powerful value-added features that deliver a secure, available, and dynamic virtual datacenter. The community’s commitment to a single open-source reference standard for virtualization is extremely powerful, and we all owe a debt to those who have contributed to Xen’s success.” For more information, please visit Xen.org. Software Development