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 Hackathon hosted by Oracle, March 6-8

Xen.org is pleased to announce that Oracle is hosting the next Xen Hackathon on their Santa Clara campus. The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, coordinate, write code and collaborate with other developers as well as allowing everyone to put names with faces. People working on documentation and other aspects of Xen, XCP, XenARM and related projects are also welcome.

There is no registration fee. However as an attendee you will need to cover your own travel, accommodation and other costs such as evening meals etc. If you want to attend, please sign up on thge wiki.

Xen talks at Industry and Open Source Events

Check out the Xen Events page.

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 May 1, 2012 PDT.

Please bear with us: a number of events for 2012 are being planned, but have not yet been confirmed.

Recent Events

Xen Day Boston 2011, Dec 9

Xen.org excited to host Xen Day 2011 in Boston. Xen Day is co-located with USENIX LISA '11. The Xen Day activities will be broken up into a series of units, which will include hands-on tutorials, interactive sessions, and training on topics ranging from Xen and XCP to cloud computing and the future of Xen. More information