Following the Path to Xen…
Xen is one of the projects I have been keeping my eye on with some interest. Xen is a virtual machine monitor, or hypervisor, developed by the University of Cambridge, UK. Xen is similar to, but not exactly the same as, VMware.
The other day I downloaded the Xen 3.0 Demo LiveCD to see what it was like. The LiveCD is obviously the easiest way to give it a test run without going through the hassle of actually installing anything.
Keeping in mind this was running off of a CD I gave it a go. Upon booting into the desktop you are given a “top” like virtual machine monitor, which shows statistics on all running Xen instances. One of the nice features of the LiveCD is that everything is pre-built for you so all you have to do is right click on the desktop and select to either start a new instance of Debian or start a new instance of CentOS.
Once you click an option to start a new instance it asks for a name for the new domain and then begins to boot. After the instance is booted it automatically launches a VNC viewer and displays the login screen.
I started off by starting a new instance of Debian. I was impressed by the performance of the virtualized instance, especially considering that this is all running off of a LiveCD and accessed through VNC. I then went on to fire off another instance of Debian and CentOS. So overall I was running three virtual instances on top of the Xen hypervisor. Performance remained impressive, I even opened Firefox in each instance and surfed the web in each…pretty cool.
Being that it all has to fit on a single CD it doesn’t come with a lot of applications to test with it but it does give you a basic feel for what Xen is like.
Two other projects related to Xen that I intend on looking into are Xenophilia and Enomalism. Xenophilia is a distribution based around Xen and has several Gtk-based utilities in the works for managing Xen. Enomalism is a Virtualized Management Console, though not yet released.
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