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It’s a Xen Thing
XenSource announced this week that it is shipping version 3.0 of its Xen system virtualization environment built on the open source Xen hypervisor.
The new version adds support for Intel’s new Virtualization Technology (VT) and will add support for AMD’s “Pacifica” virtualization technology in next year’s first half, according to a statement from Palo Alto, Calif.-based XenSource.
Other additions include support of up to 32-way symmetric multi-processing (SMP) virtualized guests, as well as support for hot-pluggable CPUs, enabling IT managers to optimize workloads by matching them to available server resources.
Xen 3.0 also supports two new addressing modes for servers with large physical memories. Support for Physical Address Extension (PAE) lets 32-bit servers address more than 4 GB of memory, while 64-bit addressing provides support for up to 1 TB.
“This release represents the first public availability of the Xen 3.0 code base and feature set to the broader open source Xen community,” XenSource’s statement said. Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems announced they will distribute Xen 3.0.
About the Author
Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.