January 2008 Archives

Recently we at BHOST.RU were deploying VPS and DDS hosting and I conducted some Xen tests on our amd64 boxes. General impression is: it works fine and stable enough for production use.

Xen is a so-called virtual machine monitor. It's able to run VMs in both paravirtualization (when guest OS core modified to communicate with host OS) and hardware virtualization (guest OS runs unmodified and virtualization handled by a virtualization-compatible CPU) modes. Xen is open-source, but there are also commercial VMMs in the market - Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare Server.

We run Xen on quad core Inte Core2 servers under a CentOS 5 Linux (it's actually free RHEL build, but it's an open secret). Also we have an Intel Xeon 5120 server for our internal needs, it works just the same.