This looks like a simple question but I can't find the answer anywhere. What Guest OSs can be run by Xen? I'm looking for a comprehensive list, a more detailed list for Windows guests would be nice, too. Wikipedia says it supports Windows XP & 2003 Server on virtualised hardware. What about Windows 7, Server 2008? I've been having difficulty finding up-to-date information. Can they all guests that Xen can run be managed? I've read that there was some problem with Linux guests not being able to recieve ACPI commands, for example. Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

[Posting from BartPE boot disk]

Have you seen these pages?

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDomUSupport
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/HowTos

With regard to Linux guests, Xen domU support has been in the vanilla kernel for some time, so any Linux distribution with a recent kernel can be a PV (paravirtualised) guest. Performance is near native, depending on guest storage (will you be exporting a physical disk or partition to the guest for installation, or one large image file, or some sort of Soft RAID or LVM setup?)

With regard to Windows guests, you need to have hardware support in your processor and BIOS, so that you can run Windows as a HVM guest. I have a NetBSD dom0 and several NetBSD domUs; Linux (Slackware and Salix) domUs, and Windows (XP and 2003) domUs. They're all stable and fast. You will of course encounter minor problems along the way but the technology is mature now. (I should say that I am running the 3.x.x branch of Xen in NetBSD; I can't speak for the newer 4.x.x branch.)

To amplify what gezley is saying:

1. With VMWare or VBox, you just create a VM and run it.

2. You can pretty much do that with Xen, too. In which case the answer to your question is "Xen can run just about any distro out there".

3. But doing it that way, "full virtualization", can be very inefficient.

Xen also offers several superior approaches, including "Paravirtualization".

4. You need to modify the OS itself to support PVM. There are many distros that have a PVM kernel available.

5. An alternate approach to Paravirtualization is to leave the OS unchanged, but make use of the "VT" capabilities in Intel x86-64 and AMD64 CPUs.

6. You can, to a large extent, mix'n'match these different approaches. Xen supports a wide spectrum.

'Hope that helps .. PSM