This page is to give some guidance to people who want to get hardware for use with Xen.

XenSource HCL Site

Since March 2007 XenSource, Inc. has been publishing hardware compatability data at http://hcl.xensource.com/.

This guide describes compatibility specifically with the commercial XenServer Product Family; since the commercial products incorporate open source Xen, this can be used as a rough guide for other Xen-capable Linux distributions, but the presence or absence of hardware on this list does not imply that it works or fails with those distros.

Other Hardware Known To Work With Xen

The following machines were added to this page manually before the XenSource list above was published:

HP ProLiant DL380 G3, 2 x 2.8 GHz XEON, 4 GB RAM, dom0: Debian 3.1 (Sarge, stable) + Xen 2.0.6, disk RAID-1+0, 3 logical drives ( as reported in
HP ProLiant DL380 G4, 2 x 3.6 GHz XEON, 4 GB RAM. Xen must be given option mem=3583M at boot (at least for non-PAE). With 2 QLogic HBAs installed there are problems initializing PCI and dom0 crashes, you may have to pass Xen the option acpi=off at boot. Fedora Core 5 test 1 and SLES 10 BETA 3 have been used for both dom0 and domU.
DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D, 1 x 1.6 GHz AMD 64 , 2 x 512 MB RAM (OCZ CAS Level 2) Debian Sarge 3.1 x86_64 stable dom0: 4 x Debian Sarge 3.1 Sable DomU's, 2 x SATA Drives (300Gb, 200Gb) and 1 WD 36GB Raptor Drive, 3 x 10/100 NICs Independantly Bridged on different Subnets
Tyan GX28 Server/Tyan B2882 MB , 2 x Opteron 248, 8G RAM, onboard SiI 3114 SATA, Gentoo 2005.1 AMD64
Tyan S2720, 2 x Xeon 2.4GHz, 6G RAM (only 4 usable under Xen 3.0 for x86), SiI 3112 SATA, 3ware 8000 Seriers SATA RAID, Gentoo 2005.1 P4
ASUS CUR-DLS, 1 x P3 1.0GHz, 1.5 G RAM, 3ware 8000 Series SATA RAID, SiI 3112 SATA, Gentoo 2005.1 P3
Fujitsu Siemens Primergy RX200 S3, RX300, RX600, 64 bits Intel Xeon, [2|4] x [36|72|300] GB 15000rpm SCSI RAID1 or RAID5 Hot-plug, up to 16 GB or RAM, 2 x Gbit/s Ethernet LAN working on Ubuntu 32 and 64bits.

As soon as such information is available, a list of known-problematic hardware should get started here (of course, it should only list hardware which otherwise works normally with the dom0 OS of choice, and only is problematic in conjunction with Xen). Also, it's probably of high interest if a specific hardware configuration runs out of the box with a Xen binary release, and which version thereof; or if additional kernel compilation or even patching was necessary for the dom0 OS. Last but not least, there's some hardware running only with acpi=off on the xen command line, which might also be of interest to some people.

(Maybe someone who knows more about these issues could make a statement on which factors influence the possibility of hardware being incompatible with Xen in general and with a specific dom0 OS).

On the List Archive

There are several threads around the topic of Xen and hardware in the list archive, notably: