The Xen virtual environment consists of the following components:
| • | Xen Hypervisor – The Xen Hypervisor creates and manages isolated execution environments called partitions. The hypervisor controls execution of virtual machine as they share the common processing environment. |
| • | Domain 0 – Domain 0 is a virtual machine running on the Xen Hypervisor that has special rights to access physical I/O resources as well as interact with the other virtual machines (Domain U: PV and HVM Guests) running on the system. All Xen virtualization environments require Domain 0 to be running before any other virtual machines can be started. |