Xen.org offers tools to build private clouds

Xen.org has released its Xen Cloud Platform for businesses that want to build private clouds and dip into virtualisation.

Xen Cloud Platform 1.0 (XCP 1.0) is designed for businesses of all sizes, right down to universities and researchers and what Xen called open source enthusiasts.

Xen.org expects that these users will be able to develop new technologies on a stable and scalable virtualisation stack that offers hooks into ad-hoc computing instances.

One customer, Andrew Warfield, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia's Department of Computer Science, said that the software had proved very useful.

"XCP gives my students the opportunity to explore interesting new applications of virtualisation, things like high-availability next-generation storage, and enhanced software development tools, against a mature, stable and scalable virtualisation stack," he said.

The XCP 1.0 platform is a single, installable image that brings together the Xen hypervisor, network and storage support, a management stack, tools and support features for guest operating systems including Windows and Linux.

XCP also links into the OpenStack Bexar infrastructure as a service offering, which provides cloud space and instances on an ad-hoc basis, and an enterprise-class API management stack with security, monitoring, patching and support features.

Lars Kurth, community manager for the Xen project, explained that XCP has a customisable and adaptable nature that could be used by companies in a variety of ways.

"Although XCP can be used as a standalone solution to build private clouds or as an enterprise server virtualisation solution, there are significant opportunities to extend, innovate and build on top of XCP," he said.

"The Xen Hypervisor and XCP are part of an end-to-end open source software stack covering all components from the bare metal to cloud orchestration software."