* Broad interoperability across disparate virtualization platforms - Through standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Virtualization Format (OVF), virtual appliances will be packaged in a hypervisor-independent format for easy transport between internal and external clouds with no proprietary vendor lock-in.
* Support for new and existing applications - Existing applications currently running in enterprise datacenters will be enabled to run in Xen-based cloud platforms without modification. This flexibility will allow users to choose where each application should run based on business needs rather than limitations of the technology or proprietary requirements of their current virtualization or cloud vendor.
* Federated computing capacity - With federated private and public clouds, the process of moving application workloads between virtual datacenters and disparate cloud service providers will be simplified.
* Standardized virtualization management - Support for DMTF standards will allow complete open management of virtual infrastructures.
* Rich virtual networking capabilities - A powerful open virtual switch will make it easy for cloud providers to add sophisticated network service offerings, including per-tenant network management, intrusion detection, firewalling, routing, and load balancing.
* Cloud-scale virtual storage infrastructures - Advanced storage features required by enterprise workloads will enable virtual machines and their physical storage to be widely separated without disrupting application performance.
"Rackspace is very excited about the direction and scope of the Xen Cloud Platform," said Lew Moorman, president and chief strategy officer, Rackspace. "We have built our Cloud Servers offering on the Xen platform and are experiencing strong customer interest in this new model of hosting. The cloud will not only reduce the cost of computing but also provide instantaneous access enabling customers to improve the speed of business. It is very exciting and encouraging to see Xen.org put the full weight of the community behind the development of a cloud platform."
The Xen Cloud Platform will address the needs of cloud providers by combining the isolation and multi-tenancy capabilities of the Xen hypervisor with enhanced security, storage and network virtualization technologies to offer a rich set of virtual infrastructure cloud services. The platform will also address user requirements for security, availability, performance and isolation across both private and public clouds. The project will not attempt to develop new, independent management and orchestration offerings since this is an area with existing rich offerings and active ongoing development in the community, including open source options from the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula.org, as well as solutions from cloud provider and commercial virtualization vendors.
The Xen Cloud Platform will combine the mobility and openness attributes of the Xen virtualization platform with innovative storage, security and network virtualization technologies already under development as part of Xen.org. As a result, the new platform will not only address cloud provider requirements around security and isolation, but will also meet next-generation user requirements for security, availability, performance, isolation and manage between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures.
