Xen Cloud Platform reaches 0.5 Release Candidate status

The Xen.org effort to deliver a Xen-based cloud computing platform, dubbed Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), was formally announced in early September 2009.

The first release, 0.1, only appeared in November 2009, with a very minor update (0.1.1) issued in January 2010.
And one of its key components, the Open vSwitch, didn’t hit the 1.0 GA status before last May.

In this timeframe XCP jumped from version 0.1.1 to 0.5 and it’s available as a Release Candidate, as announced on the official mailing list.
Even if not market as 1.0, the Xen.org team informs that “XCP-0.5 is intended to be a *stable* release, suitable for long-term production use.”

The bits don’t seem to come with up-to-date release notes so we are unable to report on the new features included in this version at the moment.