Xen Virtualization

 

What is Xen

 

Xen is a Virtual Machine Monitor VMM otherwise known as a hypervisor

It is opensource and can be installed straight onto the phyical hardware (bare metal)

Xen allows you to run several guest operating systems on the same hardware at the same time

Xen supports two modes of virtualization: paravirtualization and full virtualization.

With paravirtualization, quest operating systems must be modified and the kernel recompiled

Full virtualization is only available with physical hosts that have the Intel-VT or AMD-V processors installed. Full virtualization enables unmodified guest operating systems to run. Microsoft windows can only be run this way but does suffer a performance penalty.