New book: “The Book of Xen”
Xen is a high performance virtual machine monitor which lets sysadmins consolidate their machines and finally put those unused cycles to use, saving money on hardware, maintenance, and electricity—without sacrificing reliability, performance, or scalability.
The Book of Xen gives readers both theoretical discussions of Xen’s underpinnings and practical examples of Xen in action. Expert authors Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford begin with a high-level overview of Xen and then delve into the advanced details, like installation, networking, memory management, and virtualized storage. They also explain how to use Xen and standard Linux tools to take snapshot backups, perform QoS operations on network traffic, and limit over-aggressive disk users.
The Book of Xen teaches readers 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 option
- Migrate their systems seamlessly and create new images
- Tune and benchmark their systems to make them as fast as possible
- Troubleshoot Xen’s most common problems like network and memory management.