Table of Contents
Xen and virtualization
March Meeting: Xen and virtualization
Date: March 6, 2007 at 7 p.m.
Location: Algonquin College (Woodroffe Campus), room C144
Xen and virtualization
Speaker: Patrick Naubert
Xen is a system virtualization technology first produced by Ian Pratt of University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (now maintained by XenSource.com). It enables a single computer to pretend to be multiple computers, in much the same way that Vmware, Parallels, VirtualPC, Qemu, IBM “Logical Partitioning”, Solaris “Domains”, User-Mode-Linux and KVM does.
Xen is open source, and is based upon the Hypervisor concept, with guest operating systems running as “paravirtualized” systems. This is a cooperative approach were the guest systems are aware that they have been virtualized, as opposed to straight hardware emulators.
Newer versions of Xen can also take advantage of the guest ring descriptors present on Pentium D and newer AMD processors, permitting unmodified guests to also run. Virtualization is not new, and dates back to the 1970s when IBM 360-series mainframes were regularly virtualized.
Patrick Naubert will give an introduction to virtualization, and introduction to Xen, and will discuss some lessons learned in deployment of Xen based systems. Patrick has worked with almost every virtualization technology around.