Xend

Xend is the Xen hypervisor management daemon that formed the core of the original Xen toolstack. It runs on a Xen host and provides high-level management of virtual machines (domains), storage, and networking by coordinating with the Xen hypervisor and related userland components.

Historically, xend exposed an API, commonly an XML-RPC interface, used by Xen management tools to create, start, stop, suspend, resume, and destroy domains, as well as to configure virtual networks and attach devices. It reads domain configurations from the host’s Xen configuration files and uses XenStore to coordinate between domains and resources. Xend typically runs as a background service and is configured via a file such as xend-config.sxp in some deployments.

The xend daemon was part of the older Xen toolstack and has been progressively superseded by the xl toolstack and, in many environments, by libvirt-based management. Modern Xen deployments often omit xend entirely in favor of using xl directly or via higher-level management layers. In legacy systems, xend remains relevant for historical documentation and for maintaining compatibility with older scripts that expect a xen-tools/xend workflow.

See also Xen Project, xl toolstack, and libvirt for related management interfaces and tooling.