Open Source Virtual Machines on Xen: Creation, Implementaion and Analysis

With the rapid emergence of Cloud Computing, lots of organizations, communities, groups and individuals are rushing towards Cloud services. The cloud services have the inherent benefits like minimum running and executing cost, hassle free service accessibility, on demand availability of services, viz. computing services, storage services and even using the platforms and applications directly on pay as per use basis. The backbone of Cloud is Virtualization Technology, which is re-invented to use the underlying physical resources like CPU usage, storage devices, network devices and I/O devices in an efficient and optimum way. Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) facilitates this by running multiple instances of Virtual Machines (VMs) that are configurable, updatable, reusable and manageable. To achieve this, open source VMM namely Xen is chosen, which is highly used in most of the Clouds used for commercial and academic purposes. A wide and detailed study of Xen VM creation, implementation, suggestions and critical analysis of the same is presented here, which may help understand the Xen usage in a better way and about the intricacies and challenges of adopting Xen for developing and running applications on it.