I’ve been asked a lot about Xen as a virtualization platform and what it is. After all there has been a lot of talk about it in the press with Virtual Iron’s adoption of it, and Microsoft’s partnership with Xensource.

So what is it? Xen is an extension to the Linux kernel. Xen allows for the creation of virtual machines, however, unlike VMware it does not create a standardized x86 platform. The Xen virtual architecture is “xen86″ which is similar, but not the same as x86. This means that you can’t install any x86 operating system without recompiling it for this new architecture.

Xen promotes this platform as being more efficient than VMware’s. So far I haven’t seen any solid data to support that. Instead, it just makes it that much more difficult to create a virtual infrastructure.