Xen.org Releases Xen 4.0

Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, has stated that they have released the most advanced hypervisor software - Xen 4.0. The company has stated that more than 50 technology vendors, universities, and virtualization experts contributed in the development and availability of this software.

The Xen hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM (News - Alert), and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and various versions of the BSD operating systems.

The Xen hypervisor is a layer of software running directly on computer hardware replacing the operating system thereby allowing the computer hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. By separating the guests from the hardware, the Xen hypervisor is able to run multiple operating systems securely and independently.

The Xen.org community develops and maintains the Xen hypervisor as a free solution licensed under the GNU General Public License. Leveraging the latest network cards optimized for virtualization, Xen 4.0 provides users substantial performance and scalability gains for any level of enterprise or cloud application workload. The Xen architecture is the most well thought-out virtualization technique on the market.

Ian Pratt, founder and chairman of Xen.org has said that the explosion of cloud computing in the industry and increasing demands from enterprise customers are the driving force behind the continued technology advancement of the Xen community. The Xen hypervisor already powers most of the world's largest clouds and their customer base expects the Xen community to set the pace in virtualization infrastructure. Xen 4.0 delivers on these expectations.

Simon Crosby, CTO of Datacenter and Cloud Division at Citrix Systems (News - Alert) has said that Xen has become the most scalable and secure hypervisor in the industry, running the largest clouds with the best price performance while enabling customers to differentiate above the line. The new advancements in Xen 4.0 will bring cloud and virtualization to new levels, and Citrix is dedicated to applying them across their entire stack - from desktop virtualization to cloud computing.

Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of Business and Product Management at Novell (News - Alert) has said that as the first enterprise Linux vendor to ship and support the Xen hypervisor, Novell is pleased to bring Xen 4.0 to market within SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. With its impressive performance and scalability improvements, Xen 4.0 will allow Novell customers to achieve high consolidation ratios and significant cost savings for even the most mission-critical workloads.

Iehisa 'Ike' Nakamura, president and CEO of VA Linux Japan added that the new functionality of Xen 4.0 Hypervisor represents an excellent opportunity to support their clients. As a Xen.org advisory board member, VA Linux is pleased to be involved in the I/O performance improvement of this latest version.