Xen and the Art of Virtualization – 2010 Edition

Virtualization software reached another milestone on its road to becoming a pervasive technology with the release of Xen 4.0 by Xen.org (you can find the full announcement here).   It was just 7 short years ago in 2003 that the Xen 1.0 architecture was introduced in the paper Xen and the Art of Virtualization released by University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.  As bold as Rober M. Pirsig’s 1972 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was which explored the question of how to pursue technology to enrich human life, so too was it a bold move to bring an open source hypervisor to the emerging world of x86 virtualization – and, in that same year, for AMD to introduce the 64-bit AMD Opteron™ processor to the world of x86 computing.
With Xen 4.0 we see several significant optimizations for improved scalability and reliability over previous Xen versions, which can help improve the performance of demanding network intensive and high performance computing workloads. At AMD, we’re excited to see these new advancements as well as the ADDED support for AMD-V™ I/O Virtualization technology (IOMMU).
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