Simone
XenXen is a high performance and secure open source virtualization framework. Virtualization allows one to run many guest virtual machines on top of a host operating system such as Fedora. What this means is that using one computer, you can mimick several individual computers and even run different operating systems in each of these virtual machines. Virtualization has been around for some time in products such as VMWare and VirtualPC, however it has historically been resource intensive and the guest operating systems ran at quite a performance hit. Xen however uses a different approach of being a true hypervisor and platform and has taken virtualization to a new level of performance and security. By using modified kernels, Xen can take advantage of certain capabilities that allow you to have all the benefits of virtualization, without incurring the huge performance penalty often associated with virtualization. You can run guest operating systems at near native speeds with Xen. The security of your environment can be enhanced by running different services in complete isolation, without resorting to the purchase of additional costly hardware. If your server used to run a web server and an e-mail server together, you can now isolate these two services and run them as though they were running on completely separate machines. Using Xen, you can run an environment of multiple operating systems, all from one machine.
