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Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor, the open source industry standard for virtualization. Xen.org is a global community of independent and industry developers, university researchers, users, and virtualization gurus who regularly contribute to the shared design, development, support, and improvement of the Xen hypervisor platform.
The new release, Xen 3.4, furthers the vision of creating a powerful, efficient, and ubiquitous virtualization hypervisor. As part of the Xen community's commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:
• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements-Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.
• Reliability - Availability - Serviceability (RAS)- In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.
• Power Management - Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.
Xen 3.4 is currently available via free download to developers by visiting the Xen.org website at: http://www.xen.org/download
Momentum in the Xen Community
The Xen community remains strong and active. On average, Xen.org receives more than 750 new code submissions to the source tree each month from developers across the world working on an array of solutions within the hypervisor. Industry leading companies such as Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, Fujitsu, and Novell are part of the vibrant Xen.org community and contribute to the development of the hypervisor code. The Yankee Group's Third Annual Virtualization Survey reports a significant increase of commercial Xen-based solutions which represent 17 percent of total market share. This includes a Citrix XenServer share of 11 percent, plus an additional six percent from other open source suppliers.
On an ongoing basis, university research and other high profile Xen projects are regularly incorporated or run on the hypervisor. For example, Project Snowflock from the University of Toronto leverages the Xen hypervisor to instantaneously launch thousands of virtual machines for fast, efficient, scalable parallel processing and Project HXen extends the Type1 virtual machine monitor (VMM) functionality in Xen to a Type 2 VMM for a simplified method of deploying Xen to desktops, laptops, USB sticks and other devices where the base OS is left in place. For high availability, Project Kemari and Project Remus provide transparent, comprehensive, high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. These are examples of the various contributions across academia and within the development community to Xen.org.
To date, thousands of companies and universities have chosen the power of open source Xen, making the Xen hypervisor their choice to provide virtualization in their IT environment. Last month, more than 100 attendees from the open source community participated in the Xen Summit sponsored by Oracle; similar events are planned in Europe and Asia this year to support the growing global community.
In addition, the Xen.org community is committed to providing more resources to its members:
• Xen.org Solutions Searchis a new online tool enabling customers to quickly find consultants, hosting providers, developers, and solutions built on the Xen hypervisor platform. This search system profiles the growing ecosystem for the Xen hypervisor.
• Xen.org is committing resources to expand the global footprint for support and promotion of the open source Xen hypervisor. Materials are being translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese with the community Wiki now available in English, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Chinese, Korean Japanese, and Italian. Support groups for customers are also available in English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Italian.
• Finally, Xen.org is excited to offer an event for virtualization customers and prospects in Europe called Xen Directions,being held in conjunction with LinuxTAG on June 27, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. A variety of hands-on Xen demonstrations will be offered to the European technical audience for the first time. In 2010, Xen.org will be hosting the first event in South America as part of the FISL event in Brazil.
Ian Pratt recently was on stage during the keynote sessions at Citrix Synergy showing the current implementation of the Type 1 Xen client hypervisor running on a PC and Mac. He did the demonstrations with Patrick Gelsinger from Intel.
The complete 45 minute Intel presentation is at http://www.citrix.com/tv/#video/423.
To see Ian demonstrate the Windows Xen client go to 27 minutes 30 seconds. To see Ian demonstrate the Mac Xen client go to 42 minutes as Mark Templeton joins the stage.
For more information on the Xen Client Inititiave in the Xen.org open source community, go to http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/General_Project_Information. The complete source code of the current XCI is at http://xenbits.xen.org/xenclient. If you have any questions on the open source Xen.org community, please let me know at stephen.spector@xen.org.
Ian Pratt, Citrix VP of Engineering, founder of the open source Xen.org community, and project leader of Xen.org was recently interviewed by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte of FLOSS Weekly. The recorded podcast is about 40 minutes long and can be accessed at http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/FLOSS-067.mp3.
This PodCast is a chance to learn about the origins of the Xen.org Xen Hypervisor project, how Cloud Computing was really behind its origins, and how the Xen.org community continues to drive the leading open source hypervisor.
From 360is blog (http://360is.blogspot.com/2009/03/xenserver-administration-poster.html) you can find a very handy administration poster on XenServer.
From blog...
Since XenServer was made freely available for downloada few weeks ago, there has been a surge in companies new to virtualization, taking their first steps into this area. As you would expect, this has resulted in lots of questions on the user forum and calls to our help desk.
360is have produced a XenServer administrators poster, in A4 format, for both new and experienced admins to download for free. Do let us know what you think, and make any suggestions for improvement via the normal channels.
Thanks.
Stephen Spector
Community Manager, Xen.org
Citrix Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.
The complete source code and license information (GPL version 2) on this project is now availalbe at http://www.xen.org/download/satori.html.
The Xen.org community, creator of the open source Xen hypervisor, is hosting our North American Xen Summit event this February 24 - 25, 2009 at Oracle's HQ in Redwood City, CA. This event brings together developers, users, and researchers of the Xen hypervisor for a 2 day conference on all things Xen. The topic abstracts are now available for review with the final agenda to be published later this week at http://www.xen.org/community/xensummit.html. Some of the speakers at this event include:
• Ian Pratt - Project Leader of Xen.org
• Keir Fraser - "Gatekeeper of Xen.org"
• Dan Magenheimer - Xen guru of memory form Oracle
• Jeremy Fitzhardinge - PVOPS Xen master (includes a demo!)
• Eddie Dong - Status of SR-IOV from Intel
• Ben Serebrin - Cross-vendor migration from AMD
• Andrew Warfield - Dual Citizen of Citrix & Univ of British Columbia
• Chuck Yoo - Korea University on Real-Time VMM
• Many others...
Even if you have never participated in the Xen.org community, I strongly encourage you to consider attending this event. As an open event, you will have the opportunity to learn first hand what the Xen community is planning for future releases, what researchers are doing with Xen to enable future industry trends, and how users are leveraging the powerful Xen hypervisor to solve critical and complex problems. For Citrix XenSever customers, this event provides a glimpse into the "behind the scenes" efforts for the Xen platform that supports the XenServer product family.
Registration is only $215 including a great Xen Summit jacket, evening out at the Computer History Museum, and the chance to mingle with the Xen community. Registration is at https://www.regonline.com/xs_oracle.
I look forward to seeing everyone later this month for Xen Summit North America at Oracle 2009.
Next month, the Xen.org open source community is hosting our latest Xen Summit at Oracle's HQ in Redwood City, CA. This event brings together the leading developers of the Xen hypervisor as well as researchers and users who leverage the Xen hypervisor. For two days, you will have the opportunity to listen to and interact with a global group of industry leaders in hypervisor virtualization.
The event is planned for February 24 and 25th and includes 2 days of highly interactive discussion, an evening out at the Computer History Museuem, and other Xen Summit firsts. Registration is only $215 and is now open at https://www.regonline.com/xs_oracle.
More information on this event is available at http://www.xen.org/community/xensummit.html with local hotel information and the event agenda soon to be published. If you have any questions about this event, please contact Stephen Spector at stephen.spector@xen.org.
The open source Xen Hypervisor community, Xen.org, is hosting our first Xen Summit Asia event next month in Tokyo, Japan. The event is being hosted and sponsored by Fujitsu and is located at their Makuhari Lab located in Makuhari, Japan. The 2-day event is November 20 - 21, 2008 and will be an in-depth examination of recent research, software development, and customer deployments of the open source Xen solution. Ian Pratt will be the featured speaker at this event as he gives his "State of the Project" presentation along with ideas on future areas of development for Xen.
More information including registration instructions are athttp://xen.org/community/xensummit.html.
Anyone interested in learning more about the open source Xen solution built by the community at Xen.org can attend the North American Xen Summit in Boston, MA, June 23 - 24 as part of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference. The USENIX event is from June 22 - 27 with training sessions from the 22 - 24 and a conference from the 25 - 27. Xen Summit is held on the 23rd and 24th with a special Xen Training Day on the 22nd. For more information and to register for Xen Summit, go to http://xen.org/xensummit/.
For those of you looking for more information specifically on the open source Xen hypervisor, a new blog has been started on the Xen.org site. The blog can be found at http://blog.xen.org.
Anyone interested in learning more about the open source Xen solution built by the community at Xen.org can attend the North American Xen Summit in Boston, MA, June 23 - 24 as part of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference. The USENIX event is from June 22 - 27 with training sessions from the 22 - 24 and a conference from the 25 - 27. Plans are underway to host a day long Xen training session for the 22nd and include sessions from Xen Summit in the USENIX conference. A discount will also be offered to all Xen Summit attendees interested in going to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
More information on the event and registration information will be available soon; in the mean time, mark your calendars. Also, a European Xen Summit is also in the plans for later this year in London. Stay tuned...
For those of you working with Xen 3.1, be aware that Xen 3.2 is now launched and available at xen.org.
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CALL FOR PAPERS
3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC'08)
as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain
===============================================================
Date: August 26-29, 2008
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/ Workshop URL: http://xhpc.wu-wien.ac.at
SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Abstracts: February 4, 2008
Full Paper: April 14, 2008
Scope:
Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) are becoming tightly integrated with standard OS distributions, leading to increased adoption in many application areas including scientific educational and high-performance computing (HPC). VMMs allow for the concurrent execution of potentially large numbers of virtual machines, providing encapsulation, isolation, and the possibility for migrating VMs between physical hosts. These features enable physical clusters to be treated as "computation pools", where a variety of execution environments can be dynamically instantiated on the underlying hardware. VM technology is therefore opening up new architectures and services for HPC in cluster and grid environments, but consensus has not yet emerged on the best models and tools. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on virtualization in HPC environments, with the goal of sharing experience and promoting the development of a research community in this emerging area.
The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections.
Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.
The workshop will also include a 30 min panel discussion by presenters.
TOPICS
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following subject matters:
- Virtualization in cluster and grid environments
- Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters
- VM cluster and grid architectures
- Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security
- Compute job entry and scheduling
- Compute workload load leveling
- Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs
- VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees
- Research and education use cases
- VM cluster distribution algorithms
- MPI, PVM on virtual machines
- System sizing
- Hardware support for virtualization
- High-speed interconnects in hypervisors
- Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing
- Network architectures for VM-based clusters
- VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines
- Performance models
- Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs
- Power considerations
- VMM performance tuning on various load types
- Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools
- High-speed Device access from VMs
- Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs
- Information systems for virtualized clusters
- Management of system images for virtual machines
- Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions should include abstract, key words, the e-mail address of the corresponding author, and must not exceed 10 pages, including tables and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 point. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work.
Accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series - the format must be according to the Springer LNCS Style. Initial submissions are in PDF, accepted papers will be requested to provided source files.
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
Submission Link:
http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=6123&
IMPORTANT DATES
February 4, 2008 - Abstract submissions due Full paper submission due: April 14, 2008 Acceptance notification: May 3, 2008 Camera-ready due: May 26, 2008
Conference: August 26-29, 2008
CHAIR
Michael Alexander (chair), WU Vienna, Austria Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Jussara Almeida, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brasil Padmashree Apparao, Intel Corp., US Hassan Barada, Etisalat University College, UAE Volker Buege, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Simon Crosby, Xensource, UK Marcus Hardt, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany Sverre Jarp, CERN, Switzerland Krishna Kant, Intel Corporation, US Yves Kemp, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Naoya Maruyama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Jean-Marc Menaud, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France José E. Moreira, IBM Watson Research Center, US Yoshio Turner, HP Labs Andreas Unterkircher, CERN, Switzerland Dongyan Xu, Purdue University, US
GENERAL INFORMATION
The workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain.
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/
For all you super technical people out there looking for a great explanation of how the Xen Hypervisor works and was designed, I highly recommend getting the following book: The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor by David Chisnall. I bought it from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Hypervisor-Prentice-Software-Development/dp/013234971X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199980643&sr=8-1
I get no kickback on the order but thought people who wanted to really understand the Xen Hypervisor and how it works would like the information.
For those of you interested in the Brussels event I blogged about yesteday; here is a 30% discount code for the event: XENORG
If you are in Europe near Brussels and want to learn more about the open source solutions of virtualization, I recommend looking into a conference for January 22 - 23, 2008 at http://www.profoss.eu
Speakers currently scheduled for the event are from Sun, AMD, Novell, The 451 Group, Citrix, and many other leaders from open source projects. The event is sponsored by companies such as HP, Oracle, Unisys, and others.
Text from the Event Home Page:
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Profoss' objective is to spread objective information about the possibility to use professional solutions based on alternatives to proprietary and closed products. We focus on organising informative events, each dedicated to one subject, where professional IT people can get the information they need to make informed decisions. We also want to put you in contact with local professionals able to support you in your projects.
As you are smart enough to draw conclusions, we'll provide objective information so you can take the best decision based on your work environment, your experience, your knowledge, etc... We're not trying to sell you anything. We're only trying to bring you the most interesting information.
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