Question

What is the parallel of VMWare Player in the Xen line of products?

I.e. what do I need to run a virtual machine inside my laptop or desktop computer?

Answer 1

Use KVM and qemu, if you your laptop or desktop's CPU supports it: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main%5FPage

Answer 2

There isn't one, unfortunately. You'll need a fully-configured Xen hypervisor on any machine that you want to run your Xen VMs on.

If you're looking for a management UI, you'll have to use what Citrix provides. For the opensource Xen, you can use virt-manager, for example.

The suggestion to migrate your Xen VMs to QEMU/KVM isn't a bad one, especially if you need a desktop-like solution. For that matter, you can migrate to VMware as well and use VMware Player.

Answer 3

I would also suggest moving to kvm from Xen, but if you are talking because you need to run a Xen VM temporarily, or one that was given to you, there is a utility called xenner which lets you run Xen VMs using kvm.