June 14, 2006

From Admin-SIG

Nick will perform a demonstration of Xen, a virtual-machine package for LINUX. Xen runs over a modified LINUX kernel. You can install several virtual machines, running their own kernels, over Xen. Xen can run unmodified operating systems, including Windows, when running on special hardware (Intel VT). It is well supported for many UN*X variants.

---

[edit]

Post-meeting

Interesting stuff. There were about 10 folks attending. Nick showed us a laptop running Xen, and running 2 instances of Debian as guest OS's. He showed us some Xen config files, and some of the userland Xen stuff, using "xm." Particulary interesting to me was "xm top", which allowed you to see what resources were being used by what virtual machines.

Nick talked some about the differences between Xen and other virtualization technologies. The big advantage of Xen seems to be performance, since it does not emulate the entire computing environment. The down side is that the guest OS must be Xen aware. Sounded like most major Linux distrobutions have packages for the kernel patches required by Xen. --Jgentry 10:36, 17 Jun 2006 (MDT)

Retrieved from "http://www.nmosug.org/admin-wiki/index.php/June_14%2C_2006"