Faced with a looming deadline and about six cubic inches of space in which to cram in an RTOS, Linux, and several other odd software components, a good product developer might consider a thorough search of the internet’s available virtual machine services.
An even better one follows a bookmark toward embedded Xen.
The open source Xen Project hypervisor is free to download and use on your own, as is DornerWorks’ Virtuosity, a distribution of the Xen hypervisor for the Xilinx Zynq family of processors. Virtuosity can help you host a collection of disparate software components on a single piece of hardware without having to re-host them to a common operating system. It lets you orchestrate and combine technology in innovative ways, but it comes with a lot of moving parts.
Any hypervisor can help you get the most out of your hardware, along with secure isolation and partitioning, but teams that are new to configuring this type of platform may find proprietary solutions to be too costly. Then, when they turn to open source Xen, they find the learning curve too steep to proceed.
There’s a much easier way to enable the virtualized interoperability of Xen Project with a Quick Start Package from Dornerworks. This all-inclusive package comes with a few major features:
The first thing you’ll get with the Xen Quick Start package is a checklist that will help us gauge the benefits you’ll receive from virtualization, and how we can customize Virtuosity to best fit your system. We’ll figure out how many virtual machines you will be running, and how your system resources need to be allocated to, or shared between, those virtual machines.
Once your configuration is up and running on your chosen hardware, DornerWorks hypervisor engineers will visit your location for a two-day training workshop. They will cover Virtuosity and Xen through lecture-based instruction along with comprehensive hands-on labs, giving you a deep dive into the complexities of Xen along with practical experience using it. Engineers will boot up your target hardware and work with its scheduling algorithms. Workshop participants will also learn how to configure their VM’s resources, like CPUs and memory, and how to exclusively allocate or share key I/O peripherals.
Many of the concepts participants will become familiar with during the training are applicable to other hypervisors. Even if you don’t choose a Xen-based hypervisor for your project, the knowledge you gain from the Xen Quick Start Package training will help you work with those options.
After completing the on-site training, DornerWorks will provide additional consultation to dig into topics of importance to your project, culminating in a written report to answer key questions, allowing you to further reduce risk and increase confidence in your decision to move to a hypervisor-based solution.
Virtuosity supports virtualized development environments on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. DornerWorks maintains close partnerships with Xilinx, and can lend exclusive support to those developing systems on their devices.
The Virtuosity distribution is free and open source, but with a custom configuration engineered by DornerWorks, you can join the other companies already integrating different software components with ease, reducing size, weight, power, and costs, and doing it all on a tight schedule.
Schedule a meeting with DornerWorks today and get your product development off the ground, or purchase the Xen Quick Start Package and launch your devices before the competition.
