XenEnterprise v4 with Live Migration and High Availability

XenEnterprise is based on the Open Source Xen solution with management software, and contracts for regular updates and support on top. XenSource refers to the latest version as a milestone, and is looking to close the gap to the current market leader, VMware.

The product announcement states that new software tools for distributing and managing the virtual machines (VMs) in the enterprise infrastructure are the major technological advances. New features include XenMotion, software for live migration of virtual machines. The scalable XenCenter management software is also new.

The product announcement draws attention to a special high availability feature: a host's management status is within a defined pool is replicated over all hosts. This means that any host in the pool can take over its tasks if needed.

The integrated 64 bit hypervisor will support both 32 bit and 64 bit workloads, up to 128GB of physical memory – up to 32GB per guest VM. Thanks to the open XenAPI interface, service providers can integrate value added applications. The integrated Xen Open Source Hypervisor in version 4 supports AMD's and Intel's hardware virtualization. XenSource thus promise quasi-native performance and speed.

Many of these new features will also be included with the new versions of XenServer or the free XenExpress. XenEnterprise v4 is due for release August 20 2007. The price for XenEnterprise v4 with two sockets starts at US$ 1599 for a one year subscription; the lightweight XenServer version without XenMotion starts at US$ 495.

XenSource states that some 650 companies now use the commercial version of the software, and that customer figures have doubled in the last three months. The Open Source variant is included with various Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell's Suse Enterprise Linux.