The Xen project celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. It’s also moving to a new home at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project. Just like the Linux kernel, Xen enjoys contributions from a variety of different companies, so a vendor-neutral organization to host development and collaboration is a big win for the project.
Although KVM has garnered a lot of attention lately, Xen is still more widely deployed and used. After all, it serves as the underpinnings for all of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 virtualization. It’s also used by Cisco, Citrix, Google, and a host of other companies. Recent developments in Xen have come from organizations as diverse as the U.S. National Security Agency, SUSE Linux, Oracle, and Intel.
“The open source model is predicated upon freedom of choice, so supporting a range of open source virtualization platforms and facilitating collaboration across open source communities is a priority for The Linux Foundation,” wrote Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a blog post. “The market has proven there is opportunity for more than one way to enable virtualization in Linux, and both KVM and Xen have their own merits for different use cases.”
