Xen VPS

Xen is a monitor for virtual machines (VPS) which is designed to work on ARM, x86-64, Itanium and IA-32 architectures. Xen lets a number of operating systems to work at the same time on a computer and using the same hardware and sharing it. Initially, Xen was made by Cambridge University, through its Computer Laboratory, but since 2010, Xen is a free software which is maintained and developed further by its community. The license used by Xen is GPLv2.

The systems which use Xen have its hypervisor as the most basic and privileged layer that is installed. On top of this layer there are a number of operating systems which act as guests and which use the schedule of the hypervisor in order to utilize the processors of the computer. Domain 0 is the first OS to boot out of the guest systems that are installed. The booting is done automatically for this domain when the computer is started and it has management privileges on that computer, accessing the physical resources of the computer directly. The administrator of the system can use the dom0 to manage the computer and the secondary OS which are installed on it.

One nice thing about the Xen VPS is that the admins can move these virtual machines between different computers by using a LAN and they can do it without making the host unavailable. The procedure works by copying the virtual machine’s memory from one computer to another and the execution isn’t stopped during this time. The site is stopped only for a maximum of 300ms, at the end, in order to do the final sync between the virtual machines. The migration is seemless thanks to the way the Xen VPS is built.

Xen VPS is one of the best solutions you can go to, when you’re looking for a virtual machine to use instead of a full server.