Welcome to xen.org, home of the Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization.

The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows®, Linux®, Solaris®, and various versions of the BSD operating systems. What is Xen? - Why Xen?

Xen powers most public cloud services and many hosting services, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting and Linode. Commercial virtualization products such as Oracle VM and XenServer are built on top of Xen, as well as desktop virtualization solutions such as Qubes OS and XenClient. See case studies for detailed Xen user studies or our eco-system map for vendors, products, projects, services and research. From Linux 3.0 onwards, all of the code necessary to run Linux as the Xen management OS and as a Xen guest, is part of the Linux kernel.

The history of the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor project is available on the Xen history page. If you are new to the Xen.org community or interested in understanding how to interact with the community, please read the New to Xen Guide.

Getting Xen

For a user there are several ways to get Xen: as a Xen appliance, through a Linux distribution and from source. The appliance model provides Xen as a tested installable image: Xen.org provides an appliance through the XCP project. Project Kronos will deliver Xen packages into Linux distributions: when completed, you will get all Xen packages that are in the Xen appliance through your favourite distro's package management system. If you are interested in modfiying Xen, you can get Xen as a source distribition from the Xen Hypervisor project. However you will need to build Xen from source.

Xen Projects

The open source Xen community currently delivers several solutions for use by customers, software and hardware vendors, researchers, developers, hobbyists, etc..

Xen Hypervisor - Leading open source hypervisor for servers Learn More
Xen Cloud Platform - Enterprise cloud solution stack for virtualization Learn More
Xen ARM - Xen hypervisor for the ARM architecture Learn More
Other Xen.org projects: Learn More

The Xen.org community also supports a variety of solutions built for and around the Xen Hypervisor. Click here for a list of those projects.

Upcoming Events

Xen Day Fortaleza 2012, May 30, Brazil

Xen Day Logo

Xen Day Fortaleza is a free community organized evening of lectures focussing on virtualization with Xen and cloud management with Cloudstack. The event will be held on May 30, 2012 in Fortaleza, CE, Brasil.

XenSummit North America

The 2012 XenSummit will be held from Aug 27-28, 2012 in San Diego, CA, USA. The CFP for XenSummit is now open. All submissions must be received before midnight June 15, 2012 PDT.

Recent Events

Introduction to XCP @ Virtual Build a Cloud Day

Xen Day Boston 2011

Xen Day was a day of training, hands-on tutorials, interactive sessions on topics ranging from Xen and XCP to cloud computing and the future of Xen. More information

XenSummit Asia

Go to XenSummit Asia Presentations to get presentations and videos. Note that not all presentations and videos will be available immediately.

Xen at Industry Events

Ubuntu Developer Summit - Q, May 7-11, Oakland, CA: The Xen and XCP teams will be participating in the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA. Come and see us in Grand Ballroom B to discuss XCP Toolstack Improvements in future Ubuntu releases. If you are interested in Xen work for Q-series come meet us on Monday.