XEN Technology

About Xen Virtual Machine Technology

Xen was originally developed by the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as part of the XenoServers project. XenoServers aim to provide a 'public infrastructure for global distributed computing', and Xen plays a key part in that, allowing the efficient partitioning of a single machine to enable multiple independent clients to run their operating systems and applications in an environment providing protection, resource isolation and accounting.

Xen has since grown into a fully-fledged project in its own right, enabling investigation into interesting research issues regarding the best techniques for virtualising resources such as the CPU, memory, disk and network. The project has been bolstered by support from Intel Research Cambridge, and HP Labs.

Xen Is an Open Source Technology

The Xen hypervisor is a unique open source technology, developed collaboratively by the world's best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative data center solution vendors, including Intel, AMD, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Network Appliance, Novell, Red Hat, SGI, Sun, Unisys, Veritas, and XenSource.

Xen enjoys extraordinary community support. It is a de-facto, industry endorsed open source virtualization standard backed by the industry's leading vendors. Red Hat are supporting proposals for inclusion of Xen in the Linux kernel.

Lean and Secure

Xen is exceptionally lean - less than 50,000 lines of code. That translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests. Xen re-uses existing device drivers (both closed and open source) from Linux, making device management easy. Moreover Xen is robust to device driver failure and protects both guests and the hypervisor from faulty or malicious drivers.

Xen is the leading enabler of Utility Based Computing and Virtualisation for Large Corporations

Xen is a key part of large companies' aspirations towards a utility-based computing model, in which any server can run any operating system and any application, at any time, with dynamic load balancing of resources both within each server, between the guests, and across servers.