This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

“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 Systems

The Real–World, 100% Practical Guide to Xen Virtualization in Production Environments

Using 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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

Running Xen Review - 2008-06-17
Reviewer Rating:
Running 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.

Solid Technical Intro to Xen and Virtualization - 2008-06-09
Reviewer Rating:
I'm new to virtualization, but very technical. "Running Xen" was just right for me. Great background information and rationalization mixed with solid detail. Solid in-depth intro for anyone seeking to understand virtualization in general, and Xen in particular.

Average reading at best - 2009-02-27
Reviewer Rating:
This book just has too many authors (7). There's so much disconnect between parargraphs within the chapters. Seems one persone would right a paragraph and then another would write the next and so on.

Multiple diagrams within the figures that are not expounded upon.

Great hands on Xen coverage - 2008-10-14
Reviewer Rating:
I just got this book and I am so glad! It has made my virtualization task so much easier. It brought me up to speed on virtualization and I really like the hands-on nature of the book. I have Xen up and running with my guest disk image and all seems well so far!

Excellent book to system administrators! - 2009-09-03
Reviewer Rating:
This book is just excellent! It is a MUST title in a system administrators library interested to learn everything about virtualization using Xen. The author explains all the most important features from Xen considering theory and practical aspects. If you want to learn Xen and if you would like to have in your library a good reference about this subject, just buy this book.

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