Multi-tenant infrastructure
Keep tenant, service, and operator responsibilities visible on shared estates.
Solution Area
Open virtualization for cloud and infrastructure platforms.
Open infrastructure starts with an open virtualization layer. Xen gives operators an inspectable hypervisor for guest isolation, hardware ownership, control domains, and long-term platform sustainability.
Infrastructure layers
Services
Cloud workloads
Infrastructure workloads run above platform-owned control and lifecycle decisions.
Web services Databases AI workers Network functions
Guests
Virtual machines
VMs keep tenant, service, appliance, and build environments accountable.
Linux VM Windows VM Appliance VM Build agents
Virtualization boundary
Xen hypervisor
Guest isolation, scheduling, device ownership, and control domains stay explicit.
Owned infrastructure
Hardware
Compute, memory, storage, networking, and accelerators remain operator decisions.
Compute Storage Networking Accelerators
Xen gives infrastructure teams a visible boundary between cloud workloads, virtual machines, the hypervisor, and owned hardware.
Infrastructure ownership
Modern infrastructure still depends on a well-defined virtualization layer.
Public clouds, private clouds, hosting providers, edge sites, enterprise estates, and research clusters all need a place where hardware, guests, tenants, and operators can be reasoned about separately.
Private and public cloud
Choose a foundation teams can inspect, govern, and sustain in the open.
Hosting and edge platforms
Keep lifecycle, hardware, network, and guest ownership choices explicit.
Long-lived estates
Evaluate a foundation for platforms that evolve over years.
Technical capabilities
Capabilities for owning the platform boundary
Evaluate Xen and surrounding tooling for hardware ownership, guest lifecycle, and operational control.
PCI passthrough
Assign selected devices directly to guests when infrastructure design requires clear hardware ownership.
SR-IOV
Support I/O designs that expose virtual functions while keeping ownership visible.
NUMA awareness
Treat placement and resource locality as platform design choices.
VM migration through platform tooling
XAPI-based systems document VM migration and pool capabilities.
Control domains
Represent management, device, and platform-control responsibilities explicitly.
Hardware virtualization support
Run guest systems on hardware virtualization features while preserving platform control.
Flexible scheduling
Treat CPU allocation and scheduling policy as infrastructure design concerns.
Guest isolation
Separate guests from each other and from hardware-facing responsibilities.
Scalable VM management
Use XAPI and XCP-ng for APIs, host pools, and VM lifecycle operations above Xen.
Where Xen fits
A virtualization foundation for operators and platform builders.
Xen fits where teams need to keep guests, infrastructure hardware, and management responsibilities under a visible platform model.
Public cloud foundations
Private cloud
Enterprise virtualization
Hosting providers
Edge infrastructure
Research and lab infrastructure
Network appliances
Why architects choose Xen
Evaluation starts with ownership, openness, and maintainability.
Infrastructure teams need a project model they can inspect, sustain, and build around.
Infrastructure ownership
Operators can evaluate guests, management domains, and owned hardware together.
Open governance
Public governance and contribution paths reduce single-vendor dependency.
Inspectable source
Review source, releases, and public engineering activity before depending on the foundation.
Security response process
Security reporting and response expectations are documented for users, vendors, and contributors.
Long-lived maintainability
An open project model supports long review and update cycles.
Member-funded ecosystem
Membership helps sustain shared infrastructure, events, trademarks, and coordination.
Open engineering and project health
A project process infrastructure teams can inspect.
Governance, security handling, CI resources, releases, and contribution paths are public evaluation inputs.
Linux Foundation stewardship
Xen is organized as a Linux Foundation project with visible governance.
Public CI resources
Testing resources and CI status make project infrastructure visible.
Releases and downloads
Release artifacts and download links support evaluation and development.
Documentation and contribution
Documentation, mailing lists, and contribution paths are available for deeper review.
Next step
Evaluate the boundary, then choose the platform path.
Start with Xen architecture, review XCP-ng for a complete platform path, or join the public project work.
Infrastructure ownership
Build infrastructure on a virtualization boundary you can inspect.
Use architecture resources, XCP-ng, documentation, contribution paths, and membership to evaluate and support the open foundation.