I’m happy to announce that XCP 1.5 Beta is available! This release comes with a number of new features, most notably the Xen 4.1 hypervisor. Please go to the downloads page to download and test the beta release. If you would like to report a possible bug, please email the xen-api mailing list with the subject “XCP 1.5 BETA BUG: <subject>” (and see this for a list of bug reporting guidelines for the Xen community).
- Host Architectural Improvements. XCP 1.5 now runs on the Xen 4.1 hypervisor, provides GPT support and a smaller, more scalable Dom0.
- GPU Pass-Through. Enables a physical GPU to be assigned to a VM providing high-end graphics.
- Increased Performance and Scale. Supported limits have been increased to 1 TB memory for XCP hosts, and up to 16 virtual processors and 128 GB virtual memory for VMs. Improved XCP Tools with smaller footprint.
- Networking Improvements. Open vSwitch is now the default networking stack in XCP 1.5 and now provides formal support for Active-Backup NIC bonding.
- SR-IOV Improvements. Improved scalability and certification with the SR-IOV Test Kit. Experimental SR-IOV with XenMotion support with Solarflare SR-IOV adapters.
- Integrated Site Recovery (Disaster Recovery). Remote data replication between storage arrays with fast recovery and failback capabilities. Integrated Site Recovery works with any iSCSI or Hardware HBA storage repository.
- Virtual Appliance Support (vApp). Ability to create multi-VM and boot sequenced virtual appliances (vApps) that integrate with Integrated Site Recovery and High Availability. vApps can be easily imported and exported using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard.
- VM Import & Export Improvements. Full support for VM disk and OVF appliance imports directly from XenCenter with the ability to change VM parameters (virtual processor, virtual memory, virtual interfaces, and target storage repository) with the Import wizard. Full OVF import support for XCP, XenConvert and VMware.
- Enhanced Guest OS Support. Support for Ubuntu 10.04 (32/64-bit). Updated support for Debian Squeeze 6.0 64-bit, Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.0 (32/64-bit) and SLES 10 SP4 (32/64-bit). Experimental VM templates for CentOS 6.0 (32/64-bit), Ubuntu 10.10 (32/64-bit) and Solaris 10.
Note that XCP 1.5 is the open source edition of Citrix XenServer 6.0.
