Xen

Overview

Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization to achieve high performance (i.e., low performance penalties, typically around 2%, with worst-case scenarios at 8% performance penalty; this is in stark contrast to perfect emulation solutions which typically entail performance penalties of about 20%). Through paravirtualization, it can achieve high performance even on its host architecture (x86) which is notoriously uncooperative with traditional virtualization techniques. Unlike traditional virtual machine monitors, which provide a software-based execution environment exactly like the simulated hardware, Xen prior to version 3.0 and Intel VT-X support required the porting of guest operating systems to the Xen API. Thus far, this porting has happened for Plan 9 from Bell Labs, NetBSD, Linux, and FreeBSD. At Brainshare 2005, Novell showed a port of NetWare to Xen. A Windows XP port was carried out during the initial development of Xen, but Microsoft's licensing prevents its public release. Sun Microsystems is also actively working on a port of Solaris to Xen. source

Pointers

• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
• http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html - set up xen on NetBSD
• http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_xen3_debian - set up xen on debian
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen_(virtual_machine_monitor)
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8909
• http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/xen.html

• http://www.xensource.com/
• UnixGeekTools - other great tools for unix geeks

FreeBSD

Support is coming... Fingers crossed that the summer of code 2006 will produce an installer...