Xen.org announced the release of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) 0.5, a complete open-source cloud infrastructure platform with a powerful management toolstack based on open APIs, support for multi-tenancy, QoS and detailed metrics for consumption based charging.

The XCP 0.5 bits have been tested extensively (including 100,000s of CPU-hours) and are considered suitable for production use.

XCP 0.5 can be downloaded from:

http://www.xen.org/products/cloud_source.html

XCP 0.5 contains the following features:

• 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-based API and powerful CLI

XCP-unstable development has been happening in parallel with the stabilization of XCP 0.5 and there are lots of cool new features in the pipeline.

What’s coming next in XCP-unstable:

• automatic weekly builds on xen.org
• xen 4.0
• linux 2.6.32
• libxenlight integration
• new vhd-based storage management service
• local disk storage optimizations
• DRBD integration
• network performance improvements
• improved support for boot-from-SAN (including multipath)