Xen is a robust, secure, high performance type 1 baremetal hypervisor, or a virt ual machine monitor (VMM).

Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, e ach running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native perform ance. Xen is open source, and it's used as the core virtualization engine for ma ny vendors products. Xen is usually used as a server virtualization platform, running on headless ser vers without graphical console and controlled through the network. Some advanced users also run Xen on their graphical desktops. Xen is a baremetal hypervisor, so it's the first program that gets loaded after BIOS. Xen will then start a special privileged guest called Domain-0.