Virtual Machine Hypervisor
Xen is a high performance virtual machine hypervisor that allows a single physical server to support multiple concurrent virtual servers. Virtual servers can run diverse guest operating systems, including different flavours of Linux and Microsoft Windows. We have experience configuring and administering Xen VMs for many guest operating systems including Debian, Ubuntu Server Edition, Redhat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS.
Xen requires a custom Linux kernel for the host, or DOM0 system, which has made many Linux distributions favour KVM which uses a kernel-loadable module instead of a modified kernel.
Benefits of virtual machines include:
- Consistent deployment to development and production environments
- Partitioning of applications to isolate dependencies and minimise unintended interaction of upgrades
- Multiple operating systems can run concurrently on the same hardware
- VMs can be cloned or live migrated to new host machines in order to scale up hardware resource as required
- Legacy applications can be more easily migrated from aging physical hardware to VMs running on modern hardware
