XEN and Windows

XEN and Windows

[Scheer, Roque]

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Hello,
 
I've already learned from this list that running Windows on top of XEN
will not be possible soon (or ever).
 
However, I would like to propose the idea of running XEN on top of
Windows. That is, instead of having XEN being an hypervisor (a la VMWare
ESX Server) one could have XEN working as a virtualization layer running
on top of Windows (a la VMWare Workstation). One could then run multiple
instances of the efficient (paravirtualized) ports of Linux or BSD on
XEN, in parallel with windows applications.
 
Would the new XEN 2.0 driver architecture ease the sharing of the
windows drivers with the XEN domains (providing some driver conversion
layer is provided)?
 
- Roque
 

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Re: XEN and Windows

[Nuno Silva]

Scheer, Roque wrote:
> Hello,
>  
> I've already learned from this list that running Windows on top of XEN 
> will not be possible soon (or ever).
>  
> However, I would like to propose the idea of running XEN on top of 
> Windows. That is, instead of having XEN being an hypervisor (a la VMWare 
> ESX Server) one could have XEN working as a virtualization layer running 
> on top of Windows (a la VMWare Workstation). One could then run multiple 
> instances of the efficient (paravirtualized) ports of Linux or BSD on 
> XEN, in parallel with windows applications.
>  
> Would the new XEN 2.0 driver architecture ease the sharing of the 
> windows drivers with the XEN domains (providing some driver conversion 
> layer is provided)?

I don't think that XEN will run nicely (read: performance, xen's number 
one advantage) on anything but bare metal. But the developers can answer 
that better than me.

In the mean while you can check out Cooperative Linux at 
http://colinux.org/ that does what you want.

Peace,
Nuno Silva


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