The Xen™ virtual machine monitor
Modern computers are sufficiently powerful to use virtualization to
present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines (VMs),
each running a separate operating system instance. Successful
partitioning of a machine to support the concurrent execution of
multiple operating systems poses several challenges. Firstly, virtual
machines must be isolated from one another: it is not acceptable for
the execution of one to adversely affect the performance of
another. This is particularly true when virtual machines are owned by
mutually untrusting users. Secondly, it is necessary to support a
variety of different operating systems to accommodate the
heterogeneity of popular applications. Thirdly, the performance
overhead introduced by virtualization should be small.
Xen™ is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution
of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is
Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public
License.
Premier sponsors of the Xen work at the University of Cambridge are the EPSRC (UK Research funding Council), Intel, Network Appliance, and XenSource Inc. Thanks!
For further details contact
xen-admin@lists.sourceforge.net.
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