In November last year the Xen Cloud Platform 1.0 hit beta being the developed as the follow up of version 0.5 released in July last year, which was considered a stable release. Now the Xen community has released version 1.0 of the Xen Cloud Platform., the evolution of Citrix XenServer as described by Citrix itself.
This version supports integration with the OpenStack Bexar release, OpenStack is the platform RackSpace uses for its Cloud Solution, which it open sourced in July last year.
Compared to version 0.5 version 1.0 provides the following new features:
- Xen hypervisor version 3.4.2 included
- Linux 2.6.32 privileged domain included
- Support for Citrix XenCenter 5.6 FP1 Windows-based GUI management tool
- Scheduled backup of VMs via snapshot/export (VMPR – VM Protection and Recovery)
- Support for local storage caching (to reduce load on shared storage)
- Support for booting from SAN with multipathing
- Linux guest support: Ubuntu templates, Fedora 13/Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 templates, RHEL / CentOS / Oracle Enterprise Linux versions 5.0 to 5.5 support with a generic “RHEL 5″ template
- Guest OS support for Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2003, and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1
- Improved Redundant Disk Array Controller (RDAC) Multi Path Proxy (MPP) driver support including path health reporting and alerting through Xen API (XAPI)
- Snapshot improvements: improved reclamation of space after VM snapshots are deleted, even if the VM is running
- Inclusion of blktap (“block tap”) userspace toolkit version 2
- Support for Openstack Bexar release