cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/). There are
both commercial and free versions of Xen. The commercial versions are built on top
of the open-source version with additional enterprise features, and are developed
and supported by Xensource (http://www.xensource.com). The open-source
version is developed and maintained by the Xen community. Xen is provided as a
part of most of the major Linux distributions including Red Hat Fedora (http://
www.redhat.com) and SuSe Enterprise Linux (http://www.novell.com/linux/). In
this book we are going to explore and use the open-source version of Xen.
Some of the highlights of the latest version of Xen are as follows:
Support for the x86, x86_64, and ia64 architectures.
Near-native performance in the Xen guests for both CPU and
IO-intensive applications.
Strong isolation between the guests. Isolation provides complete partitioning
between the guests whereby each guest runs in its own world and is not
affected by any other guest.
Ability to save and restore domains.
Live migration from one piece of hardware to another with zero down time.
HVM support to run unmodified OS on Intel VT-x and AMD
Pacifica hardware.
Scalable to a large number of guests.
Support for up to 32-way SMP processors.
A very active open-source community leading the development.
Support from most major vendors such as IBM, Red Hat, and Novell.
How Does it Work?
Xen refers to each virtual machine that runs on a system as a domain.
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