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Welcome to Getting started with Xen Virtualization On CentOS 7.x. Xen is an open-source bare-metal hypervisor which allows you to run different operating systems in parallel on a single host machine. This type of hypervisor is normally referred to as a hypervisortype 1 in Virtualization world.

Meltdown and Spectre Mitigation on Xen 6.5 and Xen 7.x

Xen is used as a basis for Server virtualization, Desktop virtualization, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and embedded/hardware appliances. The ability of physical host system to run multiple guest VMs can vastly improve the utilization of the underlying hardware.

Cutting-edge features of Xen hypervisor

Xen is operating system agnostic – Main control stack (domain 0) can be Linux, NetBSD, OpenSolaris e.t.c
Driver Isolation capability – Xen can allow the main device driver for a system to run inside of a virtual machine. The VM can be rebooted in case of driver failure/crash without affecting the rest of the system.
Paravirtualization support: This allows fully paravirtualized guests to run much faster as compared to a fully virtualized guest using hardware virtualization extensions (HVM).

This article is inspired and prepared on the forked Cloudmin Xen script updated for Debian 10. However, the following procedures to be followed as precuationary before executing the updated script, which is available in this post in below section.

PHASE-I Prepare Environment for XEN

INSTALLING THE XEN HYPERVISOR AND HOST/CONTROL DOMAIN (“DOM0”)

In this step we install the Xen Project hypervisor software package, and configure the Dom0 virtual machine by way of the Debian base operating system. Once all preliminary configuration is complete, we will reboot the computer and automatically boot into the Xen hypervisor/Dom0 virtual machine to explore the new system.

INSTALL XEN HYPERVISOR

If you need to add a non-root user, the sudo package, non-free firmware, a firewall, or other necessary packages, now is the time.

Use apt-get to update the Debian base operating system package index files, and upgrade all currently installed packages. As root (or using sudo) run the following command:

# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Next, use apt-get to install the Xen Project hypervisor meta-package. Run the following command as root, adjusting the architecture suffix to suit your hardware: