Xen 4.1 Hypervisor Released 105
LarsKurth writes "The Xen.org open source community just released a new version of the Xen Hypervisor, Xen 4.1. Feature highlights include a new prototype scheduler for latency-sensitive workloads, better support for very large systems (>255 CPUs, 1GB/2MB super page sizes), new security features, and many others. During the development cycle of Xen 4.1, the Xen community worked closely with upstream Linux projects to ensure that Xen dom0 support and Xen guest support are available from unmodified Linux distributions. The release announcement contains a full list of changes."
Re:Isn't Xen dead? (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtualbox, though there is nothing specifically stopping you from using it otherwise, is pretty much aimed at the "second and/or test OS on primary desktop" use case. Run whatever primary OS, run a small number of secondary OSes or virtual test boxes because RAM is cheaper than a rats nest of towers and KVM switches. This shows in the fairly simple configuration, easy support for peripheral-passthrough and graphical guest OS window, and lack of interest in things like automated guest migration.
Xen, by contrast, is aimed much more at the "pool of VM servers supporting some large number of VM instances that are mostly there to interact over network only" style. Nothing prevents you from setting up your desktop as the dom0 OS, and using it like Virtualbox; but it would be a pain and not clearly beneficial. On the other hand, you get much more concern for large memory spaces, guest migration, and similar things.
This isn't a precise analogy(since I suspect that they share somewhat more, just for cost reasons); but asking "Why use Xen when you could use Virtualbox?" is sort of like asking "Why use VMware ESX when you could use VMware Workstation?"