Chapter 14. An Overview of Xen Enterprise Management Tools

This chapter focuses on tools and support for running Xen in an enterprise environment. The main purpose of these tools is to provide a GUI interface to simplify the process of guest creation and provisioning. Most tools also provide management consoles for controlling and monitoring currently running guests. Many tools provide support for managing multiple physical hosts and their virtual guests, including support for migration of guests between machines. Many tools provide support for administering many virtual guests in a uniform manner, such as user account management or package management support. Some tools are specific to Xen while others can be used with other virtualization systems as well. We begin with an overview of the programmatic interfaces to the Xen hypervisor, around which system management tools such as this can be built. We then survey Enterprise Xen products and Xen management software. Specifically, we examine XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress from XenSource; Virtualization Manager from IBM; Virt-Manager from Red Hat; Enomalism from Enomaly; and XenMan from the ConVirt Project.