Xen Cloud Platform - Advanced Virtualization Infrastructure for the Clouds

Xen Cloud Platform offers ISVs and service providers a complete cloud infrastructure platform with a powerful management stack based on open, standards-based APIs, support for mutli-tenancy, SLA guarantees and deteailed metrics for consumption based charging. More details in the Xen in the Cloud document.

The initial proposed solution base for the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) is available as XCP 0.5. This release contains the latest version of the Xen Hypervisor, the newly open-sourced Citrix XAPI toolstack, a prototype web UI, and compatabilty with DMTF CIM and OVF standards (Citrix Project Kensho). Additionaly, the current release of Xen Cloud Platform contains the following:

• Xen 3.4.2
• Linux 2.6.27
• Openvswitch
• Fully signed windows PV drivers
• Improved SR-IOV support
• Heterogeneous machine resource pool support
• Templates for many different guest types (including latest Ubuntu, Debian)
• Full-featured enterprise class management toolstack
• Multi-host resource pools
• Live VM snapshots, checkpoints, migration
• Disaster recovery support
• Flexible storage, networking, host power management
• Event tracking, progress notification
• Performance monitoring and alerting
• XMLRPC-bsaed API and powerful CLI

A 0.1.1 release was posted on Jan 18, 2010 with the following additional features and fixes to 0.1 release:

• Openvswitch
• XCP Console Documentation
• VNC Console Proxy and Web Front-End
• Standalone Front-End
• VM Lifecycle Queuing Deadlock Fixed
• Rare Post-Fork() Spinning XAPI Process Fixed
• Active Directory Authentication Fixes
• Memory Ballooning Fixes

The initial 0.1 release contained:

• Latest Xen 3.4.1
• Linux 2.6.27 Kernel
• Windows PV Drivers, Microsoft Certified
• XAPI Enterprise-class Management Tool Stack
• VM Lifecycle: Live snapshots, checkpoint, migration
• Resource Pools: Safe live relocation, auto configuration, DR
• Host Configuration: Flexible storage management, networking, power management
• Event Tracking: Progress, notification
• Secure Communication using SSL
• Upgrade and Patching Capabilities
• Real-time Performance Monitoring and Alerting
• Basic SR-IOV Support
• CDROM and Network Host Installer
• Full Featured "xe" CLI and web services API

A complete set of documentation on XCP 0.5 is available on the Xen Cloud Support page along with instructions to use the xe CLI tool. Xen.org is releasing XCP 0.5 in both source code and as an ISO binary image for immediate installation. A proposed roadmap for the offiical XCP 1.0 release is also available on the Xen Cloud Roadmap page. For a listing of projects that are using XCP or leverage XCP go to the XCP Projects page.

Community meetings on XCP are held monthly. Minutes from those meetings are available here.