How would you like to run several operating systems at once on the same physical hardware with virtually no performance overhead - and for free? That’s the promise and the purpose of Xen, a relatively new open source project that turns one piece of hardware into many, virtually. If you’re looking to cut costs or maximize usage or both, follow the path to Xen.
How would you like to run several operating systems at once on the same physical hardware with virtually no performance overhead — and for free? That’s the promise and the purpose of Xen, a relatively new open source project that turns one piece of hardware into many, virtually. If you’re looking to cut costs or maximize usage or both, follow the path to Xen.
Hardware virtualization allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same hardware. With such a system, many servers can run on the same physical host, providing more cost-effective use of valuables resources, including CPU, power, and space. Additionally, separate instances of one or more operating systems can be isolated from each other, providing an additional degree of security and easier management of system-wide resources like configuration files and library versions.
Up until now, there have been no open source solutions for efficient, low-level virtualization of operating systems. But now there’s Xen, a virtual machine manager (VMM) developed at the University of Cambridge.
Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization, where the operating system that is to be virtualized is modified, but the applications run unmodified. Paravirtualization achieves unparalleled performance, while still supporting existing application binaries.
At the moment, Xen supports a slightly modified Linux 2.4 kernel and NetBSD, with full support of OpenBSD coming in a few months. Xen even supports an experimental version of Windows XP (however, XP cannot be distributed, except to those who’ve signed Microsoft’s academic license),…
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