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Xen Offers Open Source Virtualization

Linux virtualization efforts advanced today in a major way with the Xen 3.0 open source release. Xen`s commercial sponsor, XenSource, working in conjunction with the new release, is also offering an application to help manage virtualization in enterprise data centers.

`For every dollar that you don`t spend on a box, you save another five or six in operating expenses,` Crosby told internetnews. `Virtualization is something that users want,` he added, `but it hasn`t necessarily helped back the adoption of Linux overall. People want virtualization. They just don`t want to pay a vast amount of money for it and they don`t want to buy into yet another proprietary feature set.`

Xen 3.0 is expected to make its way into Red Hat and Novell`s SUSE enterprise Linux distributions, as well as Solaris 10, thereby providing an open source alternative to VMware and other proprietary virtualization tools. Xen 3.0 includes numerous improvements over its predecessor, which was released a year ago and has since benefited from the involvement of IBM, among others. Sitting on top of Xen 3.0 is XenOptimizer, a commercial management tool from XenSource that enables the automatic provisioning of Xen virtual servers and provides a management dashboard for full control of the virtualized environments. According to Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, Xen is all about better and more efficient server utilizations. Xen offers the promise of getting more out of each server without requiring data centers to buy additional boxes.