The Xen hypervisor is a powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and various versions of the BSD operating systems.
Xen is not new! It has been there for quite a while.
The Xen hypervisor contains three components:
1. Xen Hypervisor
2. Domain 0 Guest (Dom0)
3. Multiple Domain Guests (DomU)
Microsoft Windows requires a HVM Guest environment is a basic requirement.
- Paravirtualization
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.
- Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM)
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.
Most of the dependencies are covered in live environment.
Xen is very useful for security specialists, system administrators, application testers and other users who roam across the world or places to places and miss their virtual environment for testing.
Booting the system with a cd is simple! Just download and burn the cd.
Booting with USB is a little tricky! We need to use unetbootin.
Download unetbootin here
Download Xen live iso file here
Open Unetbootin select bulid through ISO and select the xen iso path and destination your USB drive. We recommend minimum 2 GB as 700 MB will be used by xen and rest will be used by virtual machine Source code of Xen is also available for curious testers like us. We can build our own virtual server.
Freatures of Xen:
-The version i386 of the Xen Live CD has a Xen Hypervisor for 64-bits CPUs as an option in GRUB’s menu. You can use without any problem, a 32-bits dom0/domU on top of a 64-bits hypervisor.
-The Xorg open source X Window System.
-Basic Gnome Desktop.
-Five tools ready to use for the management of the system, they are: the command `xm’ of the Xen, the libvirt, the program virt-manager, the tool xen-tools and program Convirt.
-Two read-only root file systems that are used by four virtual machines, two servers and two work stations. The servers (server01 and server02) make use of the file “ubuntu-8.10-server-i386.squashfs” and the work stations (client01 and client02) make use of the file “ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.squashfs”, both located in the CD-ROM of the Xen Live CD.
-Pre-configured file of a virtual machine to start Windows installation.
-Example of how to convert Linux virtual machines from HVM to PVM. With the new paravirt_ops, this can be done smoothly.
-Also there is a pre-configured file of a virtual machine to start Debian Installer within a Paravirtual domU.
-Three different methods to create the virtual hard disks of their virtual machines, sparse files, discs in LVM and partitions in LVM.
-To explore the possibilities, the tools vblade and aoetools was added to work with the AoE protocol, the Redhat Cluster Suite to make the LVM cluster aware, the virtual switch VDE2 with its web interface VDEtelweb and vconfig to deal with VLANs.
Minimal Requirements to run the Xen Live CD
1 computer with a minimum of 1G of RAM;
1 compatible network card (recognized as eth0);
1 good video board.
You actualy can run Xen Live CD on every computer compatible with Debian.
To make extra virtual machines:
1 optional hard disk or network attached storage, used to host virtual disks of your new virtual machines.
Download Xen here
Video tutorial on making quick desktops with Xen
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