xenalyze(1) xen-tools xenalyze(1)NAMExenalyzeSYNOPSIS
This executable is part of the package 'xen-tools': Xen Virtualization:
Control tools for domain 0
Documentation for SUSE Linux Enterprise is available online at:
<http://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/> and also installed on the
system at /usr/share/doc/manual/
Additional documentation for a specific package may be available at
/usr/share/doc/packages/xen-tools/ ""
DESCRIPTION
Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of
multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of
performance and resource isolation.
This package contains the control tools that allow you to start, stop,
migrate, and manage virtual machines.
Modern computers are sufficiently powerful to use virtualization to
present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines (VMs), each
running a separate operating system instance. Successful partitioning
of a machine to support the concurrent execution of multiple operating
systems poses several challenges. Firstly, virtual machines must be
isolated from one another: It is not acceptable for the execution of
one to adversely affect the performance of another. This is
particularly true when virtual machines are owned by mutually
untrusting users. Secondly, it is necessary to support a variety of
different operating systems to accommodate the heterogeneity of popular
applications. Thirdly, the performance overhead introduced by
virtualization should be small.
Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization: The guest OS is
modified, mainly to enhance performance.
The Xen hypervisor (microkernel) does not provide device drivers for
your hardware (except for CPU and memory). This job is left to the
kernel that's running in domain 0. Thus the domain 0 kernel is
privileged; it has full hardware access. It's started immediately after
Xen starts up. Other domains have no access to the hardware; instead
they use virtual interfaces that are provided by Xen (with the help of
the domain 0 kernel).
Xen does support booting other Operating Systems; ports of NetBSD
(Christian Limpach), FreeBSD (Kip Macy), and Plan 9 (Ron Minnich)
exist. A port of Windows XP was developed for an earlier version of
Xen, but is not available for release due to license restrictions.
In addition to this package you need to install kernel-xen and xen to
use Xen.
AUTHORS
Ian Pratt <ian.pratt@cl.cam.ac.uk>
LICENSE
GPL v2 or later
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 2011-11-23 xenalyze(1)