Xen reached the minor release 3.0.3 as planned in September, after being delayed from initial release date in July. New features included are:

• a new easy-to-use CPU scheduler which includes weights, caps, and automatic SMP load-balancing
• support for Xen-oprofile to allow measurement and optimization of code paths
• greatly enhanced support for unmodified ("hvm") guests including Windows and legacy Linux operating systems
• support for dynamic-allocation and copy-on-write disks
• packet segmentation offload in guests to improve network performance
• enhanced support for IA64 (IPF) systems and initial support for Power

Packages for Red Hat and Novell distros are available here. A demo liveCD has been released accordingly and The Coding Studio published a screenshot walkthrough of it: After this release both XenSource and Virtual Iron are expected to launch new betas of their products, introducing support for Windows virtual machines on AMD SVM or Intel VT CPUs. Another Xen update, 3.0.4, is expected before Christmas.