Oracle joins the Xen Advisory Board

The Xen community is pleased to announce the addition of Oracle to the Xen Advisory Board. Oracle joins seven other leading enterprise vendors to offer expertise and leadership to promote the Xen hypervisor as the industry standard in open source virtualization. Because Oracle is a recognized industry leader, the Xen.org community will surely gain valuable insight into the requirements necessary for future development efforts to enable the Xen hypervisor to deliver
enterprise class features.
Throughout 2008, Oracle significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.
As with all Xen contributions, Oracle’s input has been made available to the broader Xen community and open sourced. In addition, Oracle is hosting the Xen Summit North America event in February 2009 at their headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA. More than 175 participants are expected to attend the event designed to allow the Xen.org community to collaborate and share best practices in Xen development. More information on this event is available here.
“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”
“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”
The Xen Advisory Board provides oversight and guidance to the Xen project for all community activities, technology development, and management of the Xen® trademark. The Xen Advisory Board includes membership from the top eight contributors to the Xen project, as well as the key vendors delivering the Xen hypervisor. Current advisory board members are Citrix, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.