Xen™ is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with near native performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Dell works closely with our partners and opensource community to enable Xen virtualization solutions. This page lists some important links and interesting white papers on Xen.

Important Xen Links

Xen Project Page at University of Cambridge:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/xen/

Download Open Source Xen Hypervisor:
http://xen.xensource.com/download/

Xen Summit Presentations:
http://xen.xensource.com/xensummit/

Virtualization Homepage at Novell:
http://www.novell.com/linux/virtualization/

Virtualization Homepage at Red Hat:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/virtualization/

Xen Whitepapers

Virtualization Using XenEnterprise with Dell PowerEdge Servers and Dell OpenManage
This paper outlines the Xen architecture, value additions of XenSource's XenEnterprise 3.2 product, steps to install XenEnterprise on Dell PowerEdge servers, create virtual machines, configure stroage repositories and how to manage XenEnterprise hosts using Dell OpenManage

A Performance Comparison of Commercial Hypervisors (from XenSource)
This paper studies the enterprise readiness of hypervisor-based virtualization products from VMware and XenSource. Using the award-winning VMware ESX Server hypervisor as a de-facto industry benchmark for performance and enterprise readiness, we present comparative results from an assessment of XenSource’s XenServer™ virtualization product family using industry standard benchmarks for performance and scalability.

A Performance Comparison of Commercial Hypervisors (from VMware)
This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative comparison of two virtualization hypervisors available for the x86 architecture — VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 and open-source Xen 3.0.3 — to validate their readiness for enterprise datacenters. A series of performance experiments was conducted on the latest shipping versions (at the time of this study in November 2006) for both hypervisors using Microsoft Windows as the guest operating system. This white paper discusses the results of these experiments. The discussion in this white paper should help both IT decision makers and end users to choose the right virtualization hypervisor for their datacenters.

Creating Fault-Tolerant Xen Virtualization at the Network Adapter Layer
By Scott Collier and Brian Gautreau
In development and production environments, fault tolerance at the physical network layer can be critical. Using the Linux® OS bonding driver with standardized networking configurations enables highly available, fault-tolerant physical layers for Xen guest domains.

Live Migration with Xen Virtualization Software
By David Schmidt and Puneet Dhawan
Virtualization is an emerging trend in enterprise data centers. Using virtualization software, system administrators can run multiple operating systems on a single server, therefore exploiting most of servers' resources. This article outlines an evaluation deployment of a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) application stack for a live migration setup on a virtual machine using Xen open source software. This article can server as a guide for those enterprises whishing to evaluate Xen in their environment.

An Overview of Xen Virtualization
By Tim Abels, Puneet Dhawan, and Balasubramanian Chandrasekaran
Xen virtualization technology—available for the Linux® kernel—is designed to consolidate multiple operating systems to run on a single server, normalize hardware accessed by the operating systems, isolate misbehaving applications, and migrate running OS instances from one physical server to another. This article provides an overview of Xen 3.0 architecture and how it is expected to utilize Intel® Virtualization Technology to enhance manageability and optimize resource utilization in Linux environments.

Xen and the Art of Virtualization
This paper describes the architecture of Xen 1.x.

Live Migration of Virtual Machines
This paper describes the process of Live Migration of virtual machines across physical hosts.

XEN TroubleShooting

Could not connect vkbd

• Symptome

When installing your guest OS on SLES 10 SP 1, you get the following error message:

Error: Failed to start the VM. Details: Error: Device 0 (vkbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working. Usage: xen start <Domain name>

• Reason

xen-tools-ioemu is not installed

• Solution

install xen-tools-ioemu like this:

yast -i xen-tools-ioemu