Xen Management Tools

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Xen Management Tools

This page lists various 3rd party management tools and interfaces for Xen and for XCP (Xen Cloud Platform). If you want your project listed here please edit the page or send an email to xen-devel or xen-users mailinglist and we'll update the page.

Management tools and interfaces for the traditional Xen hypervisor

• Libvirt and virt-manager. http://libvirt.org and http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/
• xen-tools. http://gitorious.org/xen-tools/xen-tools
• Zentific: http://www.zentific.com/
• Convirt: http://www.convirture.com/
• OpenQRM: http://www.openqrm.com/
• Xn-Suite: http://www.xncore.de/node/61
• Xen Orchestra: http://xen-orchestra.com/
• Ganeti: http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/

Cloud frontends for the traditional Xen hypervisor

• Eucalyptus: http://open.eucalyptus.com/
• OpenNebula: http://opennebula.org/
• Nimbus: http://www.nimbusproject.org/
• openQRM: http://www.openqrm.com/

Cloud frontends for XCP

• Openstack: http://www.openstack.org/
• XCCS (Xen Cloud Control System): http://www.xencloudcontrol.com

Management tools and interfaces for Xen Cloud Platform (XCP)

Command Line

XCP does not come with the 'xm' CLI you may have used for managing traditional Xen. Instead, XCP comes with several CLI management clients built into dom0 (the thin hypervisor host), including:

• xe (/usr/bin/xe)
• xl (/opt/xensource/bin/xl)
• For further documentation, see Command Line Interface - Running the Xen Cloud Platform Command Line Interface
• For installing the 'xe' CLI on another Linux box, see XCP Install CLI

GUIs

Citrix XenCenter is the most popular choice for managing XCP hosts, however, there are a couple minor compatibility issues that can be worked around to improve usage, as described on the XenCenter and XCP compatibility page.

• Citrix XenCenter: http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/XenCenter
• OpenXenManager: http://www.openxenmanager.com/
• XVP (Xen VNC Proxy): http://www.xvpsource.org/
• Other open source tools and projects related to XCP can be found here: Open Source Projects, Tools & Apps for XCP

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and libraries to manage Xen or XCP

• XenAPI (XAPI): http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XAPI_Developer_Guide
• Libxenlight (libxl): Xen 4.0 contains initial implemention of libxl, which is common lowlevel library to manage Xen hypervisor. It's written in C so that it can be shared by various higher level tools and libraries. Xen 4.1 (xen-unstable) continues to add more features to libxl and xl. See Xen Summit 2010 NA slides about libxl: http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/xen-summit-amd2010v3