Xen Cloud Platform reaches version 0.5

A few weeks after the release candidate status, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) reaches version 0.5.

As virtualization.info reported at that time, even if not marked 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 new build include the following components and features, including:

  • Xen 3.4.2
  • Linux kernel 2.6.27
  • Open vSwitch 1.0

  • Storage, network and host power management
  • Event tracking
  • Performance monitoring and alerting
  • Support for virtual machines live snapshots, checkpoints and migrations
  • Support for multi-host resource pools with heterogeneous machines
  • Support for disaster recovery
  • Signed para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest operating systems
  • Virtual machine templates for many different guest types (including latest Ubuntu, Debian Linux distributions)
  • XMLRPC-based API and command line interface (CLI)

While finalizing this release, the Xen.org team has also worked on the unstable branch of XCP, including additional features that customers will see in future, like the adoption of Xen 4.0 and the Linux kernel 2.6.32, as well as a new storage management service based on the VHD format and the integration with DRBD, the open source clustering solution that has been include in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.33.