Xen is a powerful, open-source Type 1 (or "bare-metal") hypervisor. This means it runs directly on your computer's hardware, acting as a foundation before any operating system loads.
It has a unique architecture that separates it from other hypervisors like KVM or VirtualBox (which is a Type 2 hypervisor that runs inside an existing OS).
- Hypervisor: The core Xen software. It's a minimal "microkernel" that schedules and isolates a computer's physical resources (CPU, memory) between different virtual machines.
- Dom0 (Control Domain): This is the most important concept. Dom0 is a special, privileged virtual machine that runs first. It's typically a modified Linux that has special drivers to talk to the Xen hypervisor. You use Dom0 to: