Xen Hypervisor

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What Does Xen Hypervisor Mean?

Xen is a hypervisor that enables the simultaneous creation, execution and management of multiple virtual machines on one physical computer.

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Xen was developed by XenSource, which was purchased by Citrix Systems in 2007. Xen was first released in 2003. It is an open source hypervisor. It also comes in an enterprise version.

Techopedia Explains Xen Hypervisor

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.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.