Xen, a "hypervisor," is a thin layer of software that governs how different operating systems access computer resources, such as processors and memory. Virtualisation software is used to draw more use of out servers by running several applications -- potentially on different operating systems -- on a single machine.
XenSource leads the open-source community that creates the Xen software and sells associated products and services.
Version 3 of Xen has been upgraded to run on large, multiprocessor servers with up to 32 processors and to allow administrators to "hot plug" processors to balance a computing load among different CPUs.
This new version runs natively on virtualisation technologies built into Intel's chips. XenSource said it also intends to support AMD's Pacifica hardware virtualisation in early 2006.
In addition, XenSource released XenOptimiser, an administration tool for managing large-scale implementations of virtual machines.
