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Linux Foundation Takes On Xen
The open-source Xen hypervisor is now being managed by The Linux Foundation.
The open-source Xen hypervisor is now being managed by The Linux Foundation.
Management and future development of the Xen hypervisor technology will now fall under the auspices of The Linux Foundation.
According to a blog post by Xen community manager Lars Knuth, the Xen Project will now become part of The Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, with the project being moved from Xen.org to XenProject.org. Besides the redirection, there is expected to be no visible impact of the project to the community, but Knuth's post alludes to his hopes for "more code contributions, better integration with Linux distributions, increased adoption of Xen, more integration with other projects, better marketing" in the future.
Xen Project itself is an open source community that has been refining the Xen hypervisor technology over the past decade of its existence, specifically Xen hypervisor, Xen Cloud Platform, and Xen ARM.
Xen originally started as a research project at the University of Cambridge, and was initially managed by the researchers who formed XenSource in 2003. That company was acquired by Citrix, which went on to develop commercial products based on Xen and which subsequently began prefixing quite a few of its products with the Xen name. Xen itself has continued to be developed independently.
Xen hypervisor technology is used by Amazon Web Services to power some of its services, and its code also underlies Citrix's XenServer, XenClient and a host of other Citrix technologies. It can also be found in other products: OracleVM, Sun xVM, CA AppLogic, and the Eucalyptus IaaS platform, to name a few.
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.