High performance XEN setup on CentOS 5.4 (amd64)
The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64 and other CPU architectures.
With Xen virtualization, a small software known as the Xen hypervisor is inserted between the server's hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more "virtual servers", effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. It needs extremely low overhead and provides near-native performance for guests OS's (virtual servers). Xen is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL2) and is available at no charge in both source and object format. Xen is, and always will be, open sourced, uniting the industry and the Xen ecosystem to speed the adoption of virtualization in the enterprise.
I will be using CentOS 5.4 (x86_64) for both the host OS (dom0) and the guest OS (domU's) and LVM based block devices for guest OS's.
High performance XEN setup on ubuntu 8.04 (amd64)
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install XEN on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) Server System (amd64) without compromising on disk I/O and network throughput. You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files or source compilation are required.
Xen is an open-source para-virtualizing virtual machine monitor (VMM), or 'hypervisor', for the x86 processor architecture. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines on a single physical system with close-to-native performance. Xen facilitates enterprise-grade functionality, including:
- Virtual machines with performance close to native hardware
- Live migration of running virtual machines between physical hosts
- Up to 32 virtual CPUs per guest virtual machine, with VCPU hotplug
- x86/32, x86/32 with PAE, and x86/64 platform support
- Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) for unmodified guest operating systems (including Microsoft Windows)
- AMD Virtualization Technology (SVM aka Pacifica) on AM2 and F stepping Opterons (2006H2)
- Excellent hardware support (supports almost all Linux device drivers)