On October 1st, Xen announce the release of Xen Cloud Platform 1.6 Beta.
Xen scheduled a test day for October 9th, it would be possible to test the product, to give feedback and to report possible issues. Unless main problems are found the final release would be October 24.
Among the new features and improvement of XCP 1.6:
Storage XenMotion: allows running VMs to be moved from one host to another. This includes the case where (a) VMs are not located on storage shared between the hosts and (b) hosts are not in the same resource pool. This enables system administrators to:
Live VDI Migration: allows system administrators to relocate a VM’s Virtual Disk Image (VDI) without shutting down the VM. This enables system administrators to:
Networking Enhancements:
Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support: enables the use of industry-standard network bonding features to provide fault-tolerance and load balancing of network traffic.
Source Load Balancing (SLB) improvements: allows up to 4 NICs to be used in an active-active bond. This improves total network throughput and increases fault tolerance in the event of hardware failures. The SLB balancing algorithm has been modified to reduce load on switches in large deployments.
Multi-Tenancy improvements: allows system administrators to restrict a VM to send and receive traffic on a specific MAC address and a number of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, without relying on VLANs and switch management software. When these extensions are deployed VMs cannot impersonate any other VM, or intercept traffic intended for any other VM. This increases security in environments where VMs cannot be fully trusted.
VLAN Scalability improvements: removes a previous limitation which caused VM deployment delays when large numbers of VLANs were in use. This improvement enables administrators using XCP 1.6 to deploy hundreds of VLANs in a XCP pool quickly.
Emergency Network Reset: provides a simple mechanism to recover and reset a host’s networking, allowing system administrators to revert XCP hosts to a known good networking state.
IPv6 Guest Support: enables the use of IPv6 addresses within guests allowing network administrators to plan for network growth.
Enhanced Guest OS Support: Newly Supported Guests:
- Ubuntu 12.04
- CentOS 5.7, 1.5, 6.1, 6.2
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, 6.1, 6.2
- Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.7, 6.1, 6.2
- Ongoing Improvements