Why Xen?
The Xen hypervisor is a unique open source technology that invented by a team at the University of Cambridge and is being developed co-operatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 major data center solution vendors. With Xen virtualization, a thin software layer (known as the Xen hypervisor) is installed directly on the hardware, or “bare metal”, and sites between the server’s hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more “virtual servers”, effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. Xen is exceptionally lean – less than 50,000 lines of code – which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.
