Professional Xen Virtualization Review

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Professional Xen Virtualization ReviewI was the first person to post a review for this book, and it appeared on amazon but then it disappeared a week or so later and a 5 star review showed up... makes me wonder... At any rate this "re-review" will not be as complete as my first review.
This book is pretty low quality. The author is overly verbose for many things that are not really directly relevant. Case in point, the first 3 chapters are spent talking about virtualization in general, and then the alternative options to Xen. That would be fine if this book was titled "professional virtualization," but it is not... it is supposed to be about Xen, so why would the author waste a full 1/3 of the book telling us what else we might want to use?
The actual meat of the book, the stuff thats actually useful, is pretty much the exact same information you can get from the Xen handbook/users guide online. The author does not provide much if any further value or insight.
Finally the Author must have been hurting for a page count because the 10-15% (i had it actually calculated in my first review.. i believe it was 11%) is an appendix and command reference for Xen.
All in all, this book is not any thing worth spending money on if you are looking for a serious Xen guide. I would recommend one of the two following books over this one."Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization" (available 4/08)
or
"The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor" (currently available)
Professional Xen Virtualization OverviewThis book presents you with a complete foundation on the Xen technology and shows you how Xen virtualization offers faster response times for new server and service requests, a simplified system administration for multiple systems, and better availability for critical computing resources. Packed with detailed examples of Xen configuration files, system configuration files, and system-level configuration information, this book shows you why Xen virtualization is among the leading emerging technologies on the Linux platform and is being integrated into virtually every commercial distribution.

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Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization Review

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Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization ReviewRunning Xen Review
Running Xen takes a unique approach to introducing Xen to both the novice and expert virtualization user. The authors start off introducing just enough of the core concepts to give the reader an adequate basis on which the book later builds on to provide the required skills to effectively run a virtual environment. A brief explanation of Xen architecture follows with an overview of the management tools with real world examples showing actual output. I found this attention to often overlooked detail refreshing such as the use of ssh with keys and X Forwarding to securely communicate with guests impressive, instead of simply using an easier less secure method for example. The reader could choose to skip ahead if the topic was already understood but providing that level of detail is integral to the learning process in my opinion. Simply getting a Xen server up and running accomplishes nothing for the user needing to actually run and administer it after, which is where most technical books fail.
The walk through with guest disk images and creating them correctly was well appreciated instead of leaving that to the reader to hopefully figure out. All popular methods for populating guests were covered which allowed distro specific tools to be utilized instead of requiring non native methods or leaving the reader unprepared. Device virtualization was covered, but I assume as Xen is constantly evolving the information at print time regarding hiding a PCI device from Dom0 was still accurate but is now slightly different. Fortunately, all the pointers to additional reading would lead the user to finding the current procedure. Networking was covered in detail which is an often misunderstood part of Xen and a working example of a purely virtual segment using a dummy interface was shown which I found fairly useful. Guest resource management provided an understanding for topics such as the IO Scheduler and gave examples on how to tune it.
This was my second book on Xen and completely replaces the first as a much more competent reference. I highly recommend this book for anyone using Xen for its concrete basis and good reference it provides.Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization Overview"This accessible and immediately useful book expertly provides the Xen community with everything it needs to know to download, build, deploy and manage Xen implementations."—Ian Pratt, Xen Project Leader VP Advanced Technology, Citrix SystemsThe Real–World, 100% Practical Guide to Xen Virtualization in Production EnvironmentsUsing free, open source Xen virtualization software, you can save money, gain new flexibility, improve utilization, and simplify everything from disaster recovery to software testing. Running Xen brings together all the knowledge you need to create and manage high–performance Xen virtual machines in any environment. Drawing on the unparalleled experience of a world–class Xen team, it covers everything from installation to administration—sharing field-tested insights, best practices, and case studies you can find nowhere else.The authors begin with a primer on virtualization: its concepts, uses, and advantages. Next, they tour Xen's capabilities, explore the Xen LiveCD, introduce the Xen hypervisor, and walk you through configuring your own hard–disk–based Xen installation. After you're running, they guide you through each leading method for creating "guests" and migrating existing systems to run as Xen guests. Then they offer comprehensive coverage of managing and securing Xen guests, devices, networks, and distributed resources. Whether you're an administrator, data center manager, developer, system integrator, or ISP, Running Xen will help you achieve your goals with Xen–reliably, efficiently, with outstanding performance, and at a surprisingly low cost.•Understanding the Xen hypervisor: what it does, and how it works•Using pre-built system images, including compressed file systems•Managing domains with the xm console•Populating and storing guest images•Planning, designing, and configuring networks in Xen•Utilizing Xen security: special purpose VMs, virtual network segments, remote access, firewalls, network monitors, sHype access control, Xen Security Modules (XSM), and more•Managing guest resources: memory, CPU, and I/O•Employing Xen in the enterprise: tools, products, and techniques

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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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