XenSource Introduces XenServer™ Product Family of High Performance Virtualization Products for Windows and Linux Based on the Open Source Xen™ Hypervisor
Available now, XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress offer revolutionary new choice for easy deployment of x86 server virtualization to enterprise customers of any size
PALO ALTO, Calif., December 11, 2006 -- XenSource, Inc. today announced a comprehensive family of server virtualization products supported and maintained by the company leading the evolution of Xen. Designed to meet the needs of a broad range of users, the XenSource XenServer product family includes the recently announced XenEnterprise™, the market’s first enterprise-grade commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows® and Linux guests.
New additions include XenServer™, for Windows standard server environments; and, XenExpress™, a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Available now, all three products share the same architecture, delivering bare metal performance and facilitating easy migration and upgrades. Additionally, the new products offer a broad array of hardware device support, giving customers hardware investment protection and high utility.
With extensive code contributions from Intel and AMD to optimize Xen performance on their newest CPUs, the new products immediately enable users to leverage the power of the Xen paravirtualized architecture and the Intel VT and AMD processors with AMD Virtualization™ -- which include hardware virtualization support for superior performance.
“Now that virtualization of multiple OS environments is possible, more individuals and companies will look at using Xen in their data centers as well as for specific test activities,” said Tony Iams, vice president of System Software research at Ideas International, Inc. “By offering a complete product family for server virtualization, XenSource is helping to make Xen and virtualization simple, accessible, and able to address the needs of any size environment.”
Based on the latest version of the open source Xen hypervisor, the XenServer product family delivers bare metal performance for virtualized guest operating systems. The commercial products, available now, are:
XenEnterprise™: Designed for the heterogeneous environment of enterprises, XenEnterprise delivers the performance, open source innovation, unified architecture and broad hardware support of the Xen hypervisor for x86 server virtualization of multiple operating systems, including Windows and Linux. XenEnterprise emphasizes ease of use, and simple deployment of the Xen hypervisor and guest virtual servers. It also provides the ability to install and manage multiple guests on the same server, with no imposed limit to concurrent virtual machines; network storage support; and resource controls for CPU, memory, net and disk. XenEnterprise offers integrated support for Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters from Emulex and QLogic. XenEnterprise will include additional features such as live migration, 64-bit support, high availability/failover and concurrent shared storage support in the first half of 2007.
XenServer™: Designed for Windows standard server environments, XenServer gives IT professionals a high performance, easy to use virtualization platform for Windows now. It is an easy-to-use server virtualization platform for running Windows virtual machines on bare metal x86 systems with Intel VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization assist. Key features include Windows compatible guests, up to eight concurrent virtual machines, multi-host management console, network storage support and resource controls for CPU, memory, networking, and disk I/O.
XenExpress™: Ideal for developers and technology enthusiasts, XenExpress is a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. XenExpress offers all of the performance and features of XenEnterprise, while enabling users to manage one server at a time. XenExpress can be freely downloaded today from the XenSource website and includes a license for a single server and four concurrent virtual machines. XenExpress supports both Windows and Linux guests. Additionally, because of the common, unified architecture, XenExpress can be easily upgraded to XenServer or XenEnterprise with a simple license key.
“We are sparking a revolution in the mass adoption of virtualization with XenSource and the XenServer product family. XenSource is freeing up demand for virtualization which has been constrained by high priced, proprietary solutions. Because of our open source business model and the support of hundreds of developers worldwide XenSource products offer tremendous performance, broad hardware support, and a rich feature set for our customers,” said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. “The immediate availability for purchase of the XenServer product family will enable customers to confidently and quickly get started now with commercial versions of Xen virtualization regardless of the type of environment or size of data center they have.”
Supported Operating Systems Guests and Hardware Requirements
XenSource products include support of Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 and Windows XP guests. Guest support for Windows Server 2000 will be added in Q1 2007. Windows requires x86 systems with Intel VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization support. Supported Linux guests include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Debian Sarge. Linux runs with any standard x86 system and does not require Intel VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization support.
Availability and Pricing
XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress are available now. XenEnterprise and XenServer can be purchased from an authorized XenSource reseller, and pricing for XenEnterprise starts at $488 for an annual subscription license per dual socket server, and $750 perpetual license per dual socket server. XenServer pricing is $99 for an annual subscription for a dual socket license. XenExpress is free, and can be downloaded from the XenSource Web site.
For more information about XenSource products or information on becoming a XenSource reseller or partner, visit http://www.xensource.com or contact info@xensource.com
About XenSource Products
For enterprises, IT professionals and technology enthusiasts seeking to benefit from virtualization of Windows and Linux in x86 server environments, XenSource products offer easy to use multi-OS virtualization solutions with built-in virtual machine lifecycle management, at breakthrough price and performance. The benefits from increased server utilization result in efficiency and savings on data center management and operational costs.
XenSource products offer the following key benefits:
Superior Bare Metal Performance: Bare-metal Windows and Linux performance leveraging the Xen paravirtualized architecture and hardware virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMD® V enabled processors.
Easy to use: Automated step by step installers and a comprehensive management toolkit combined into a single package enable customers to get Xen up and running fast and also quickly build and manage a virtualization infrastructure.
Open Source Model: Built on the open source Xen™ Hypervisor which benefits from regular innovations and contributions from hundreds of top developers from companies including IBM, HP, Intel, AMD and many others. Because of the open source nature of Xen, new features are made available at a much faster pace than proprietary virtualization offerings or those within operating systems projects with multi-year development cycles.
Unified Architecture: With a single, lightweight unified architecture based on Xen, customers can confidently implement and know they will be able to easily move up the XenSource product ladder with a simple license key. Similarly, all XenSource products share a common and standard API and SDK, allowing developers and ISVs to write once for all XenSource products. The Xen architecture is extremely lightweight and ideal as an embeddable virtualization component for OEMs.
Broadest Hardware Device Support: XenSource products leverage the existing device drivers in the Linux kernel stack, giving our products a broad and tested set of hardware device drivers enabling customers to run within diverse hardware environments with confidence.
About Xen
The Xen™ hypervisor is the industry-standard open source infrastructure virtualization software created and maintained by the founders of XenSource, Inc., and developed collaboratively by 20 of the world’s most innovative data center solution vendors. Xen allows multiple virtual server instances to run concurrently on the same physical server, with near native performance and per-virtual server performance guarantees. The technology is being adopted world wide in enterprise datacenters to increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership.
About XenSource
XenSource, Inc. develops the XenServer™ product family based on the industry’s highest-performance virtualization technology, the open source Xen™ Hypervisor. The product family includes XenEnterprise™, a leading enterprise-grade multi-OS platform virtualization solution, XenServer™ for high performance Windows virtualization and XenExpress™, a free, production-ready product for developers and IT enthusiasts. For more information, visit http://www.xensource.com.
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XenSource, Xen, XenEnterprise, XenServer and XenExpress are trademarks of XenSource, Inc. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.