Xen is primarily a bare-metal, type-1 hypervisor that can be directly installed on computer hardware without the need for a host operating system. Because it's a type-1 hypervisor, Xen controls, monitors and manages the hardware, peripheral and I/O resources directly. Guest virtual machines request Xen to provision any resource and must install Xen virtual device drivers to access hardware components. Xen supports multiple instances of the same or different operating systems with native support for most operating systems, including Windows and Linux. Moreover, Xen can be used on x86, IA-32 and ARM processor architecture.