The release has been announced on the development mailing list and features

• Xen Security Modules (XSM)
• ACPI S3 suspend-to-RAM support for the host system
• Preliminary PCI pass-through support (using appropriate Intel or AMD
  I/O-virtualisation hardware)
• Preliminary support for a wider range of bootloaders in fully virtualised
• (HVM) guests, using full emulation of x86 'real mode'.

Announced on monday, Oracle VM is now available for download. Oracle VM is touted as three time faster than the competition, but this claim is taken with a grain of salt. With the availability of the software, performance tests are now possible. Oracle is heavily pushing its own virtualisation solution against competitors, only supporting its products running in virtualised environments if it is virtualised with Oracle VM.
Guest operating system supported by Oracle VM are several versions of Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows. Note however that Windows runs significantly slower than on a physical machine, and that Oracle is working on Windows drivers to improve the situation.

Citrix has inked a deal with Dell and HP for the distribution of Xen on these companies' servers, respectively Dell Poweredge and HP ProLiant and BladeSystem. After the acquisition of Xen Source by Citrix, the latter seems hard at work and announced plans for desktop virtualisation.

The virtualisation market is very hot, and the aquisition of XenSource by Citrix, for $500 million, just confirms that. But what does in this aquicisition justify this price tag, as Xen is Open Source after all, and Citrix could simply have forked Xen? The answer is simple, when you fork without solid reasons, you don't get the community support.

The question in such an aquisition is to know if it will turn out to be a good or a bad thing. Although people seem confident, the Open Source nature of Xen ensures its users that they won't be left out alone in the cold, even if Citrix were to screw things up.

XenSource released XenEntreprise v4, based on version 3.1 of the open source project hypervisor Xen. It introduces XenMotion™ for live migration, XenCenter for management (Windows application). Simon Crosby, Xensource's CTO, thinks this release puts them in the same league as VMWare.