The Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), announced in August 2009, is the Citrix answer to the VMware vCloud initiative that a few hosting providers are implementing worldwide.
The first XCP implementation (version 0.1) emerged in November 2009.
This week the Xen.org community announced a little step forward which moves the platform to version 0.1.1, which includes a number of improvements.
The platform is on based on Xen 3.4.2 and its Dom0 is now based on CentOS 5.4.
The most important news anyway is that the team expects to deliver the alpha no later than early February.
It’s a good news but at this pace customers won’t have anything concrete (like a XCP 1.0 GA) before next year. And considering that the VMware partners have frozen their vCloud Express implementations in an “unlimited beta” status, maybe we should all reconsider the idea that 2010 is the year of private clouds. More likely 2012.