The Book of Xen: A Practical Guide for the System Administrator Review

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The Book of Xen: A Practical Guide for the System Administrator ReviewI've read this book as well, and I can say I absolutely LOVE it. I'm not sure if I agree with the other reviewer's analysis of the book, it seems like he comes from a non-technical background and prefers to want to know all the reasoning behind certain ways to do a proper Xen setup. I've been using Xen for the last 1.5 years and I can say this book is absolutely essential for anyone using Xen on 2 or more computers. I own a mini cloud with my own miniature cluster of Xen instances (roughly 60 virtual machines), and it's hard to get things right if you're unfamiliar with all the tools that Xen offers. For example, "The Book of Xen" makes it easy and straightforward for doing backups using LVM, with everything down to the exact command needed to run at the prompt.
It also has a great chapter on running Xen on alternative operating systems like Solaris. It took me about 10 hours of searching through tutorials on the net to figure out how to get Solaris to properly install on a Xen instance. I'm using OpenSolaris on Xen for my personal home backups so that they can run on the popular ZFS filesystem using raidz. The tutorials on the internet are mostly wrong and incomplete, but the step by step instructions in the book made it quite easy.
I also loved the chapter on Xen migration, something I've been doing pretty poorly and haphazardly using various scripts of my own. Although I'm pretty confident at the Linux command line, there are a few things I didn't know about how to run a proper Xen migration. I especially liked the section about live migration -- most of my friends running Xen on their colocated servers don't know this subject well and could probably learn a thing or two by reading this chapter.
There's also a cool chapter on running Windows XP on Xen. I've been trying to get multiple XP instances running under my Xen infrastructure so that I could run my Selenium integration test suite under a native IE8 web browser, but so far it has been really hard. I'm really happy the book distills the painful parts of the set up process in just one chapter.
Most of the time Xen "just works", but I'm glad the book has a good chapter on troubleshooting Xen issues. I've run into a bunch of these issues when trying to boot my OpenSolaris instance under Xen and without the book's troubleshooting recommendations, I probably would have been stuck for hours on the problem.
This book is great for anyone who just wants to get things done, it's not a book to learn about the internals of Xen. I'd recommend Mr R. Kolodziej to buy a book about basic Linux system administration before reading "The Book of Xen". Anyone installing xen-tools on Debian will probably know what their doing and will be the perfect reader for this book. If you don't know Linux well enough, I would recommend reading Mr Nemeth's well regarded "Linux Administration Handbook" before reading this one.The Book of Xen: A Practical Guide for the System Administrator Overview
Xen, the open source virtualization tool, is a system administrator's dream. Xen is a free, high-performance virtual machine monitor that lets you consolidate your hardware and finally put those unused cycles to use—without sacrificing reliability, performance, or scalability.

The Book of Xen explains everything you need to know in order to use Xen effectively, including installation, networking, memory management, and virtualized storage. You'll also learn how to use Xen and standard Linux tools to take snapshot backups, perform QoS operations on network traffic, and limit over-aggressive disk users.

Authors Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford show you how to:

Provide virtual hosting for dozens of users, each with their own individual needs
Install and manage multiple guests, including various flavors of Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, and Windows
Choose the right virtual storage options for your needs
Migrate your systems seamlessly and create new images
Tune and benchmark your systems to make them as fast as possible
Troubleshoot Xen's most common problems like network and memory management

Expert advice is priceless when it comes to running a complicated open source virtualization technology like Xen. You'll get the advice you need in The Book of Xen.


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