XenSource Announces High Performance Virtualization of Microsoft Windows and Linux By VSM News Staff published: Tuesday, November 14 2006
With broad industry support, XenEnterprise delivers breakthrough price and performance in multi-OS environments and as industry’s first commercial implementation of Xen virtualization for Windows and Linux
PALO ALTO, Calif. – November 6, 2006 – XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced XenEnterprise for Windows and Linux, the market’s first commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows® and Linux guests. XenEnterprise includes the latest version of the Xen hypervisor, Xen 3.0.3, which has been developed collaboratively by the Xen ecosystem. XenEnterprise now delivers the performance, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor for x86 server virtualization of multiple operating systems, including Windows and Linux, and is delivered in a form factor that emphasizes ease of use, simple deployment of the Xen hypervisor and guest virtual servers, and the ability to install and manage multiple guests on the same server. With a comprehensive management and monitoring console, XenEnterprise comes at an affordable price tag to encourage rapid adoption of Xen server virtualization.
“For Windows and Linux IT professionals XenEnterprise delivers virtualization for Windows and Linux today in a high performance, easy to use, affordable and supported commercial product,” said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. “Unlike competing products, we don’t believe the cost of the virtualization software should exceed the cost of the server. XenEnterprise is the fastest and easiest way to deploy the market leading Xen™ hypervisor for Windows and Linux.
The announcement of the availability of XenEnterprise comes on the heels of Microsoft and XenSource’s recent strategic announcement to collaborate on the development of interoperable virtualization solutions, focused on the support of Xen-enabled Linux guests and the future Microsoft Server Windows “Longhorn” Hypervisor. XenEnterprise leverages the key innovation of Xen – paravirtualization – to deliver near “bare metal” performance to virtualized guest operating systems. It allows customers to immediately realize cost savings resulting from server consolidation and increased utilization, in combination with the new power of Intel VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization.
“Customers with mixed IT environments, such as open source and commercial software, expect it all to work together,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft and XenSource are collaborating to enhance interoperability for our mutual customers. Our customers with Premier-level support agreements running Windows within XenEnterprise, or other non-Microsoft virtualization software, can look to Microsoft for commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential interoperability issues.”
“Virtualization has become an important tool to help clients reduce their cost of ownership and increase the availability and resiliency of their infrastructure,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, IBM Virtualization. “Virtualization also empowers clients with greater flexibility, and XenEnterprise represents an important new option. Virtualization adds significant enterprise capabilities to the x86 server environment, and IBM delivers the management solutions to harness them.”
“For our HP ProLiant and BladeSystem customers, infrastructure virtualization is key to cost-effective and flexible resource utilization,” said Lee Johns, director, Velocity Software, Software Global Business Unit, HP. “Xen and XenEnterprise play an important role in this space by providing customer choice and an open source virtual machine layer. HP enables customers to confidently adopt virtual machines today and plans to extend its virtual machine management to Xen so customers can deploy and manage Xen alongside their existing virtual and physical infrastructure.”
“Red Hat has collaborated with XenSource and the open source community to deliver technology for cross platform server virtualization,” said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat. “This community-driven innovation solves customer problems in heterogeneous environments, making interoperability easier, thus reducing customers' costs and improving their productivity. Virtualization is an excellent example of the rapid innovation which results from open standards and collaborative development, and Red Hat is committed to continued support of the open source Xen hypervisor and to compatibility between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5® and XenEnterprise.”
“Intel® Virtualization Technology along with Intel's contributions to Xen 3.0 laid the foundation to enable XenEnterprise to optimize virtualization support for mainstream operating systems including Windows,” said Ram Peddibhotla, director of the Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation. “With Intel Virtualization Technology integrated into its products, XenSource is positioned to accelerate the adoption of hardware-assisted virtualization to satisfy a wide variety of enterprise I.T. needs. The combination of Xen and Intel Xeon® 5100 servers is a formidable platform for volume server virtualization.”
“AMD believes in open development and we congratulate XenSource on the launch of XenEnterprise,” said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, Commercial Segment, AMD. “Combined with the performance and memory management advantages of the AMD Opteron™ processor and the hardware enhancements promised by AMD Virtualization, XenEnterprise leverages the open innovation enabled by AMD64 technology. XenSource is addressing customer demand for a virtualization solution that can utilize hardware virtualization to maximize the efficiency of IT operations.”
“Stratus is enthusiastic about the launch of XenEnterprise,” said Tim Wegner, general manager, Avance Group, Stratus Technologies, Inc. “We believe XenEnterprise performance and pricing has the potential to change the landscape of the server virtualization market and will be a catalyst for significant expansion of the technology.”
Availability and Pricing
XenEnterprise with Windows 2003, Windows XP, and major Linux distribution guest virtualization is available now for beta and paid pilots and will be made generally available in December. Virtualization of Windows 2000 guests will be generally available in the first quarter of 2007. XenEnterprise for select Linux guests was made generally available in August 2006.
Pricing for XenEnterprise starts at $488 for an annual subscription license per dual socket server, and $750 perpetual license per dual socket server. XenEnterprise can be purchased from an authorized XenSource reseller. For more information on the beta and paid pilots or to view a demo, visit: www.xensource.com or contact
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About XenEnterprise
For Linux and Windows IT professionals seeking to benefits from virtualization of Linux and Windows in x86 server environments, XenEnterprise offers an easy to use solution with built-in virtual machine lifecycle management, at breakthrough price and performance. XenEnterprise is a Windows and multi-OS virtualization solution that offers the Linux and Windows IT professionals all of the performance advantages of the Xen hypervisor. Based on Xen 3.0.3, XenEnterprise delivers a full virtualization solution for Windows operating system environments. The benefits from increased server utilization result in efficiency and savings on data center management and operational costs.
XenEnterprise includes the following key features:
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Easy to use: XenEnterprise offers Xen and guest operating system installers, P2V tools and a comprehensive management toolkit into a single package to enable customers to get Xen up and running fast and quickly build and manage a running virtualization infrastructure.
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Superior performance: XenEnterprise offers near bare-metal Linux and Windows performance and fine-grained resource control for guest virtual servers, leveraging the Xen paravirtualized architecture and hardware virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMDV enabled processors.
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Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: XenEnterprise delivers dramatic improvements in server utilization, reducing capital expenditures and infrastructure management costs.
About Xen
The Xen hypervisor is the industry-standard open source infrastructure virtualization software created and maintained by the founders of XenSource, Inc., and developed collaboratively by 20 of the world’s most innovative data center solution vendors. Xen allows multiple virtual server instances to run concurrently on the same physical server, with near native performance and per-virtual server performance guarantees. The technology is being adopted world wide in enterprise datacenters to increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership.
About XenSource
XenSource, Inc. develops the leading enterprise grade multi-OS platform virtualization solution, XenEnterprise™, based on the industry’s highest-performance virtualization technology, the open source Xen™ hypervisor. Founded and run by the Xen development team, XenSource products allow enterprises to realize the TCO savings that result from server consolidation, increased utilization, and reduced complexity in the datacenter. For more information about becoming a XenSource customer, or to become a XenSource re-seller or partner visit http://www.xensource.com.
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XenSource, Xen and XenEnterprise are trademarks of XenSource, Inc.
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