After releasing the first beta in October this year, the Xen community today released version 1.6 of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), a cloud management platform. XCP includes the Xen Hypervisor, the enterprise ready Xen API toolstack and integrations for cloud, storage and networking solutions.The Xen Hypervisor serves as a basis for commercial products like Oracle VM and Citrix XenServer and is in use at cloudproviders such as Amazon and Rackspace.
Since the Xen Community released version 1.0 in March 2011 a lot of features have been added as can be seen in the XCP Release Features comparison matrix.
New features include of version 1.6 include:
- Storage XenMotion, allowing running VMs to be moved from one host to another where the storage between those hosts are not shared or the hosts are not in the same resource pool.
- Live Virtual Disk Image migration, allowing storage movement of VMs without shutting down the VM.
- Networking enhancements
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support
- Source Load Balancing (SLB)
- Multi-tenancy improvements
- VLAN Scalability
- Emergency Network Reset
- IPv6 Guest Support
- Simplified mechanism to adjust Control Domain ("dom0") vCPUs.
- Updated Open vSwitch: v1.4.2 provides stability and performance improvements.
- Integrated StorageLink (iSL) support for EMC VNX series arrays.
- GPU Pass-through: support for up to 4 GPUs per host.
- Interoperability extensions for 3rd Party Tools: additional asynchronous XenAPI C language binding, Workload Balancing (WLB) extensions and general improvements.
- Support for hypervisor monitoring (vhostmd) allows SAP software to run inside a XCP VM.
The following guest Oss are now supported:
- 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
More information about this release can be found in the release notes.