Virtualization with Xen and XCP

The Xen Hypervisor was built for the Cloud from the outset: when Xen was designed, we anticipated a world, which today is known as cloud computing. Today, Xen powers the largest clouds in production.

This talk explores success criteria, architecture, trade-offs and challenges for cloudy hypervisors. It is intended for users and developers and starts with a brief introduction to Xen and XCP, their architecture and on common challenges for KVM and Xen.

I will introduce the concept of domain disaggregation as an approach to increase security, robustness and scalability: all important factors for building clouds at scale and show how advanced security features suchas Xen Security Modules and SELinux can help secure your cloud further.

The talk will conclude with exciting developments in the Xen community, such as Xen for ARM servers, a new virtualization mode for Xen, running applications without OS in a Xen guest and point out their implications for building open source clouds.