NewtoXenGuide.pdf

New to Xen Guide

July 2010

Stephen Spector

Xen.org Community Manager

Table of Contents

Introduction................................................................................................................................................3

What is Xen Hypervisor?...........................................................................................................................3

Xen Projects...............................................................................................................................................5

Xen Community.........................................................................................................................................5

Xen Mailing Lists.......................................................................................................................................6

Xen Events.................................................................................................................................................7

Xen Support...............................................................................................................................................7

Xen Solutions and Bugs.............................................................................................................................7

Xen User Groups........................................................................................................................................8

Xen Website Layout...................................................................................................................................8

Home – www.xen.org............................................................................................................................8

Products – www.xen.org/products.........................................................................................................8

Support – www.xen.org/support............................................................................................................9

Community – www.xen.org/community...............................................................................................9

News – www.xen.org/news...................................................................................................................9

Xen Wiki Layout......................................................................................................................................10

Introduction

This document is targeted at new developers, users, researchers, or other interested parties who want to

learn more about the Xen hypervisor, open source community, or other Xen projects underway within

Xen.org. It contains a wide variety of information and many links to the relevant content in the

Xen.org wiki or Xen.org website.

What is Xen Hypervisor?

The Xen hypervisor is a layer of software running directly on computer hardware replacing the

operating system thereby allowing the computer hardware to run multiple guest operating systems

concurrently. Support for x86, x86-64, Itanium, Power PC, and ARM processors allow the Xen

hypervisor to run on a wide variety of computing devices and currently supports Linux, NetBSD,

FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and other common operating systems as guests running on the hypervisor.

The Xen.org community develops and maintains the Xen hypervisor as a free solution licensed under

the GNU General Public License.

Hardware Hardware

Standard Computer

Hardware + OS

Virt. Computer

Hardware + Xen

A computer running the Xen hypervisor contains three components:

• Xen Hypervisor

• Domain 0, the Privileged Domain (Dom0) – Privileged guest running on the hypervisor with

direct hardware access and guest management responsibilities

• Multiple DomainU, Unprivileged Domain Guests (DomU) – Unprivileged guests running on

the hypervisor; they have no direct access to hardware (e.g. memory, disk, etc.)

Domain 0

Guest

Domain

Guest

...

Domain

Guest

Hardware

The Xen hyperviso r runs directly on the hardware and becomes the interface for all hardware requests

such as CPU, I/O, and disk for the guest operating systems. By separating the guests from the

hardware, the Xen hypervisor is able to run multiple operating systems securely and independently.

The Domain 0 Guest referred to as Dom0 is launched by the Xen hypervisor during initial system

start-up and can run any operating system except Windows. The Dom0 has unique privileges to access

the Xen hypervisor that is not allocated to any other Domain Guests. These privileges allow it to

manage all aspects of Domain Guests such as starting, stopping, I/O requests, etc. A system

administrator can log into Dom0 and manage the entire computer system.

The Domain Guests referred to as DomUs or unprivileged domains are launched and controlled by the

Dom0 and independently operate on the system. These guests are either run with a special modified

operating system referred to as paravirtualizion or un-modified operating systems leveraging special

virtualization hardware (Intel VT and AMD-V) referred to as hardware virtual machine (HVM). Note

– Microsoft Windows requires a HVM Guest environment.

A term used to describe a virtualization technique that allows the operating system to be aware

that it is running on a hypervisor instead of base hardware. The operating system must be

modified to accommodate the unique situation of running on a hypervisor instead of basic

hardware.

A term used to describe an operating system that is running in a virtualized environment

unchanged and unaware that it is not running directly on the hardware. Special hardware is

required to allow this, thus the term HVM.

• Paravirtualization

• Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM)

Xen Projects

The Xen.org community currently supports several projects for people to take part in:

• Xen ARM – Xen hypervisor port to ARM processor

◦Wiki - http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XenARM

◦Website - http://www.xen.org/products/projects.html

• Xen Introspection Project – a comprehensive set of APIs allowing developers and solution

vendors to have direct access to a variety of monitored features for a specific running virtual

machine on a Xen hypervisor

◦Wiki – http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Xen_Introspection

• Xen Cloud Platform – a complete cloud infrastructure platform with a powerful

management stack based on open, standards based APIs, support or multi-tenancy, SLA

guarantees and detailed metrics for consumption based charging in an ISO format

◦Wiki – http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XCP_Overview

◦Website - http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html

• Xen Client Initiative – Xen hypervisor port to client devices including laptops

◦Wiki – http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XCI

◦Website - http://www.xen.org/products/xci.html

• Hosted Xen – Run Xen hypervisor as a type-2 hypervisor in an operating system (MacOSX

& Windows)

◦Wiki – http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Xen_HXEN

◦Website - http://www.xen.org/products/projects.html

A list of available Xen projects can be found at

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDevelopmentProjects .

Xen Community

As an open source community, Xen.org has a variety of “characters” and members who contribute

various ideas, software, etc to the betterment of Xen. In early 2010, the Xen.org community created

our first mascot:

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