The foundation of Citrix XenServer™ is the open source Xen® hypervisor, a proven and fully supported engine for server virtualization.

What is Xen?

Xen is a unique open source technology invented by a team led by Ian Pratt at the University of Cambridge and developed cooperatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative datacenter solution vendors. With Xen server virtualization and desktop virtualization solutions, a thin software layer (known as the Xen hypervisor) is installed directly on the hardware, or bare metal, and is thereby inserted between the server’s hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more virtual machines, effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. Xen’s paravirtualization technology is widely acknowledged as the fastest and most secure virtualization software in the industry and is enhanced by taking full advantage of the latest Intel® VT and AMD-V™ hardware virtualization assist capabilities. The Xen hypervisor is exceptionally lean-– about 50,000 lines of code-–which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.

Powering Citrix XenServer for server virtualization

The inventors and lead developers of Xen, with the rest of the XenServer team, take this powerful virtualization engine and build out a full managed server virtualization platform, designed for efficient management of Windows and Linux virtual machines and cost-effective server consolidation.

XenServer is free enterprise-ready, cloud-proven server virtualization infrastructure that delivers the ten minutes to Xen experience of easy installation and intuitive XenCenter multi-server management, with flexible storage integration and open APIs that enable users to use their best-of-breed tools to enhance their enterprise system and storage management processes.

With the addition of Citrix Essentials for XenServer, customers can create highly scalable, manageable and agile virtual server infrastructures. Citrix Essentials enables optimized usage of computing resources through intelligent workload placement and rapid provisioning of new virtual machine resources on demand.  It also streamlines storage management in virtual environments through integration with existing storage platforms.