subject: What Is Xen Hosting And Which Are The Pros To Those That Implement It [print this page] What is Xen cloud servers hosting and what are its benefits to you as a user is the question that many are asking. Technology is changing so fast that it is difficult to maintain the latest trends and efficiencies for our lives. Xen host used to be just a research project at a famous renown college. That turned into a business, which in turn became a buy out and name changing occurred during that time. Finally it became open source and is free to all users.
In the Xen systems there are layers of software. The lowest layer and the one with the most privileges is called the hypervisor. It supports more than one guest operating system which is scheduled to run on the CPU. The first guest operating system is referred to as domain 0, or dom0 for short and is automatically executed when the hypervisor boots up and receives its privileges. The system administrator has the power to log into dom0 and manage other guest operating systems, which go by user domains, or domU, in Xen language.
The hypervisor has become the industry standard for virtualization on various CPU architectures. It can support a wide array of guest operating systems including Windows. Xen hosting is the power behind most public cloud services and hosting services.
Marketing virtualization products and desktop virtualization are built upon a Xen base. Businesses who wish to increase their server utilization and consolidate server farms, and cut costs and complexity, are turning to server virtualization. The hypervisor is the most secure and is the fastest virtualization solution available.
Xen virtualization through the hypervisor layer allows each individual server to run one individual or many different virtual servers. This detaches the operating system and all of its applications from the individual server separate underneath. The Xen hypervisor is a leading open source technology for servers.
Several best of breed companies in the computer biz collaborated on further developing the system. They created the Xen cloud based system and also made it open sourced. It is free for all users in the source style format or the object format. By doing this, their technology will stay open sourced and be available to all business's. This guarantees that industry leaders can work together in speeding the process of virtualization along.
One great thing about the hypervisor is that is does not have a lot of code to tie up space. At only 150,000 lines of Xen coding, it is fairly small and leaves room for better quality performance from the hypervisor and more space for the operating systems. The other great thing is that the hypervisor is so strong is can protect against future viruses and device failures.
Xen host has operating system neutrality, it is capable of allowing any operating system to be your domain 0. It is not bogged down with unrelated operating system overhead when processing guests. There is a whole community of support and help for this technology. The paravirtualization technology is now a part of mainstream enterprise. These reasons and more are what is Xen hosting and what are its benefits to you as an end user or as a business.
