XenSource Unveils Virtualization Product Based on the Open Source Xen Hypervisor
XenSource Unveils Virtualization Product Based on the Open Source Xen Hypervisor
By VSM News Staff published: Monday, April 03 2006
XenEnterprise™ enables virtualization of servers running Windows and other mainstream operating systems resulting in increased server utilization, IT cost reduction and improved operational agility
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, BOSTON – April 3, 2006 – XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced XenEnterprise™, its first commercially-packaged virtualization solution, based on Xen 3.0, to virtualize servers running mainstream operating systems. XenEnterprise brings the performance, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor to the market in a product that emphasizes ease of use, simple deployment and management of Xen-based virtual infrastructure.
“By using XenEnterprise, enterprises can clearly implement a virtualization platform resulting in increased server utilization, IT cost reduction and improved operational agility,” said Peter Levine, president and CEO of XenSource. “XenEnterprise, from the creators of Xen, provides customers a superior virtualization solution, offering openness and price performance benefits over proprietary offerings.”
XenEnterprise leverages the key innovation of Xen called para-virtualization, together with microprocessor support for virtualization, to deliver near “bare metal” performance to virtualized guest operating systems. It allows customers to immediately realize the power of Intel Virtualization Technology and next-generation AMD Virtualization for server consolidation. By delivering an integrated package to simplify deployment, provisioning and management of a Xen-based virtual infrastructure, XenSource gives customers everything they need to provision virtual servers to rapidly respond to changing business needs and ensure business continuity.
To facilitate multiple operating systems support and ensure interoperability with Windows virtualization environments, XenSource has licensed Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format to offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server, and provide management and recovery of virtual machine IT infrastructures. The Microsoft VHD format, which represents the application image format of Microsoft virtualization technologies, is available to all third parties under a royalty-free license so that they can build additional value-added tools and capabilities for virtual machines.
“Customers have open source software and commercial software, and expect it all to work together. By licensing the VHD format, XenSource and other partners are able to build value-added tools that interoperate with Microsoft’s Windows virtualization technologies,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft Corp. “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 resolve interoperability issues.”
"We are pleased to work with XenSource to bring the Xen hypervisor into the enterprise data center," said Holger Dyroff, Novell's vice president of Product Management for SUSE Linux. "Both Novell and XenSource are key contributors to the Xen open source project. XenEnterprise is a good solution for companies who want to predominantly deploy Windows on Xen. If you want to deploy Linux on Xen, then SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the platform of choice."
XenEnterprise includes the same industry-leading open source Xen 3.0 virtualization engine as the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. Both vendors have played an important role in getting Xen patches submitted to kernel.org for inclusion in the mainline kernel as the de-facto standard for Linux virtualization. “As leaders of the open source Xen Project, our focus over the last year has been to enable our key community partners Red Hat and Novell to integrate Xen 3.0 into their enterprise Linux products,” said Frank Artale, vice president, Business Development at XenSource. “We now look forward to building strong commercial relationships that will allow us to complement their products in the Linux market.
Based on Xen 3.0, XenEnterprise delivers a full virtualization solution for single or multiple 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:
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 quickly build and manage a running virtualization infrastructure.
Superior performance: XenEnterprise offers near-native performance and fine-grained resource control for guest virtual servers, and virtualizes all x86 operating systems, leveraging the hardware virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMD SVM enabled processors.
Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: XenEnterprise delivers dramatic improvements in server utilization, reducing capital expenditures and infrastructure management costs.
“Intel was the first to provide hardware-assisted virtualization with Intel® Virtualization Technology in clients and servers. Intel’s broad ecosystem of major OEMs, ISVs, OS vendors and channel dealers will provide support and help bring the benefits of virtualization into the mainstream,” said Richard Wirt, Intel vice president, senior fellow, and general manager, Intel Software and Solutions Group. “Intel Virtualization Technology along with Intel's contributions to the open source Xen 3.0 code base laid the foundation to enable XenEnterprise to optimize support for mainstream operating systems. With Intel Virtualization Technology integrated into its products, XenSource is positioned to rapidly accelerate the adoption of hardware-assisted virtualization to satisfy a wide variety of data-center needs.”
“AMD is pleased to see XenSource announce virtualization products that take advantage of the performance and memory management advantages of the AMD Opteron™ processor," said Joe Menard, corporate vice president, Software Strategy, AMD. “AMD is a strong believer in open development and has contributed code to the Xen project to support AMD Virtualization, which AMD plans to bring to market in the first half of 2006. AMD and XenSource have collaborated on a number of other enhancements to the Xen project. Our customers want a virtualization solution that can utilize hardware virtualization to deliver bare-metal performance for all operating systems, to maximize the efficiency of their IT operations.”
XenEnterprise is currently available in beta form, with product availability scheduled for 2H06. For more information, visit: www.xensource.com or contact
sales@xensource.com.
About Xen
Xen 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. Xen is designed to exploit hardware virtualization capabilities in the latest Intel and AMD processors to offer the highest performance for all virtualized guest operating systems.
About XenSource, Inc.
XenSource, Inc. develops software virtualization solutions based on the industry’s highest performance virtualization technology, the open source Xen hypervisor. Founded and run by the original Xen development team, XenSource products allow enterprises to realize the benefits that result from server consolidation, increased utilization, and reduced complexity in the datacenter. For more information, visit www.xensource.com.
