Presentation on Xen and the Art of Virtualization
Xen is one of the most popular & widely used virtual machine monitor. It was introduced in the 2003 publication Xen and the Art of Virtualization by Paul Barham et al. of University of Cambridge Computer Lab. Here's part of the abstract for a quick overview:
This paper presents Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality. This is achieved by providing an idealized virtual machine abstraction to which operating systems such as Linux, BSD and Windows XP, can be ported with minimal effort.
Xen defines a primary virtual machine called the "Domain 0" which has direct access to hadware and also manages the other virtual machines running on the system. The Domain 0 is also called the Xen Hypervisor. Running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine not only allows us to overcome the lack of environment/ user separation facility in traditional OSes but also ensures maximum utilization of available hardware. The latter has given rise to the cloud computing culture where many users share the same hardware, not necessarily simultaneously and enjoy the benefits of low cost hosting.
Unlike most academic projects, Xen has become a commercial success and now being used by different cloud computing service providers e.g. Amazon EC2. Xen is an open source project and have been enjoying contributions from hardware vendors like Intel and AMD, who have made it possible for Xen to run different OSes in virtual environments without any modification and with very little overhead.
As an assignment for Dr. Gabriel Parmer's Spring 2010 Advanced Operating System course, I reviewed the aforementioned paper on Xen and presented my findings at the class.
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