Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the many people who provided feedback and suggestions on the book’s content. Simon Crosby provided key feedback on the overall content of the book. Keir Fraser answered a number of technical questions with amazing speed and good humor. Andy Warfield provided feedback for Chapter 9. We thank all the Xen contributors who have released their work to the open source community.

Several of the authors attended the Xen Summit at IBM T.J. Watson Research in April 2007 and we would like to express our gratitude to all the organizers and attendees. Many people provided invaluable feedback and advice in various conversations—short and long. We would especially like to thank Sean Dague, who provided excellent overall Xen advice and feedback throughout this process, and Jose Renato Santos, who provided detailed feedback on the networking material in the book. In general, online materials from all the Xen summits were an invaluable resource for us, as was the Xen Wiki, Xen mailing lists, and other similar resources. We appreciate the efforts of all the individuals who contributed to those materials.

We would like to thank everyone who read early drafts of the book. Jessie Yu in particular went above and beyond the call of duty in reviewing and helping to revise many chapters. Jim Owens provided valuable early feedback for Chapter 13. Tom “Spot” Callaway from Red Hat gave us some excellent suggestions about Chapter 14. (Thanks also to Spot and Máirìn Duffy for several screenshots in that chapter.) Chris Peterman did some early writing on the security chapter and provided valuable comments in the initial phases of organizing the text. Lindsay Hoffman and Barbara Brady provided detailed comments on the writing in Chapter 10. Ryan Kornheisl read a number of chapters and helped test many of the instructions in the book. Anthony Peltz also helped with testing.

We would also like to thank everyone who helped with final revisions. In the last days before the manuscript was submitted, a small army of people volunteered to do a fresh read of many chapters, finding everything from typos to substantial problems. We would like to thank Zach Shepherd, Keegan M. Lowenstein, Igor Hernandez, Alexander M. Polimeni, Erika Gorczyca, Justin Bennett, Joseph Skufca, Mathew S. McCarrell, Krista Gould, and Ron Arenas. We couldn’t have done it without you! Tom Doeppner and Dan Kuebrich from Brown University also provided some very helpful feedback on Chapter 3. We would especially like to thank Michael Thurston and Ken Hess for their excellent suggestions. Beside the authors, we believe they are the only ones who have read the entire book!

We would like to thank many members of the Clarkson Open Source Institute and Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory who over time added to our understanding and hands-on experience with Xen. Bryan Clark (now at Red Hat), Steven Evanchik (now at VMware), Matt Finlayson, and Jason Herne (both now at IBM) were all coauthors on the 2004 “Xen and the Art of Repeated Research” paper. Jason Herne, Patricia Jablonski, Leslie Cherian, and Michael McCabe were all coauthors on the 2005 “Data Protection and Rapid Recovery From Attack With A Virtual Private File Server and Virtual Machine Appliances” paper, which used Xen for some of the prototypes being tested. Madhu Hapauarachchi, Demetrios Dimatos, Gary Hamilton, Michael McCabe, and Jim Owens were coauthors on the 2007 paper “Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems.” Justin Basinger, Michael McCabe, and Ed Despard were part of the Xenophilia project that won second place in the 2005 Unisys Tuxmaster competition. Cyrus Katrak and Zach Shepherd have been key to the deployment of Xen in our production environment in the Applied CS labs. They have both been a crucial source of advice and feedback.

We would like to thank the OpenSolaris Xen Community Leaders, especially Todd Clayton, Mark Johnson, John Levon, and Christopher Beal, for their quick and helpful responses over e-mail and IRC during our testing of Xen on OpenSolaris. We would like to have included more coverage of Solaris in this book. Additional support in Solaris for Xen beyond what is covered in this book is expected soon.

We would like to thank our editor, Debra Williams Cauley, for her help and encouragement through this entire process. Thanks also to Catherine Nolan who initially contacted us about this project.

Richard A. Wilbur provided access to early HVM-enabled equipment used in testing.

Jeanna Matthews would like to thank her husband Leonard Matthews and children Robert and Abigail Matthews for their patience and love throughout this whole process. She would also like to thank her current and former students—including the six other authors on this book—for all she continues to learn from them.

Eli M. Dow would like to thank his parents, Terry and Mona, as well as his siblings, Ian and Ashley, for everything. He would also like to thank IBM and the Test and Integration Center for Linux for their support during the writing process. Specifically he wishes to acknowledge Frank Lefevre, Duane Beyer, Robert Jay Brenneman, Phil Chan, Scott Loveland, and Kyle Smith for their insightful conversations regarding virtualization and this book in particular. Eli would also like to thank the wonderful faculty and staff at Clarkson University who made his academic career such a wonderful experience. Lastly he would like to thank his significant other, Jessie, for her enduring patience during the writing process.

Todd Deshane would like to thank his significant other, Patty, for her support during the writing of this book.

Wenjin Hu would like to thank his mom, Yajuan Song, and his dad, Hengduo Hu, for their constant support of his study at Clarkson University, and his friend, Liang Zheng, for emotional support.

Patrick F. Wilbur would like to thank his mother, Claudia, his father, Richard, and his significant other, Krista, for their support and patience throughout the development of this book.