The Book of Xen: A Practical Guide for the System Administrator

The Book of Xen: A Practical Guide for the System Administrator

Chris Takemura

Language: English

Pages: 312

ISBN: 1593271867

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to 13 to consider the commercial XenSource product. But again, we think we’ve put useful information throughout the book. NOTE We’ve tried to keep this book as distribution- and version-independent as possible, except in the tutorial sections, where we try to be extremely specific and detailed, and in the distro-specific notes, which are necessarily, er, distro-specific. Often we will get carried away and make some ridiculous broad generalization, like “only an idiot would use Linux as an NFS

thoroughly in Chapters 3 and 6.) Once you’ve made your selections and gone through the install, the machine will reboot. Log in, and then shut the machine down via shutdown -h now (remember, it’s an ordinary Linux box) so that we can look a bit more at things from the dom0 end. 18 C ha pt er 2 Anatomy of a Domain Configuration File Let’s take a moment to examine the config file that virt-install generated for us. As we’ve mentioned already, the config file is /etc/xen/ by

domain config file. Since we went to all the trouble of updating PyGRUB, we’ll use it directly here: bootloader='pygrub' cpu_weight=1024 memory = 1024 B ey on d L in ux : U s i ng X en w it h O th er U n ix -li ke O Ss 117 name = "rosaline" vif = ['vifname=rosaline,ip=192.0.2.136,bridge=xenbr0,mac=00:16:3e:59:A7:88' ] disk = [ #'file:/opt/distros/osol-0811.iso,xvdf:cdrom,r', 'phy:/dev/verona/rosaline,xvda,w' ] NOTE PV-GRUB, at this time, isn’t able to load an OpenSolaris kernel properly.

templates. Go to the Install dialog, select your distro and an install source (physical media, ISO, or network), enter a name, tweak the parameters if desired, and click Install. It’s a bit harder to install an unsupported distro. However, the hardware emulation mode allows you to install any Linux distro by selecting the Other Install Media template and booting from the OS CD. From that point, proceed as with a normal install on hardware. When you have the domain installed, you can configure it

either from a separate management host (which can run either Windows or Linux) or in local mode directly on the XenServer host.11 Citrix includes xe as an RPM on the Linux supplement CD in the client_install directory. Make sure you have the required stunnel package. In our case, to install it on Slackware, we did: # cd /media/XenServer-5.0.0 Linux Pack/client_install # rpm -ivh --nodeps xe-cli-5.0.0-13192p.i386.rpm When the client is installed on a remote machine, you can run it. Make sure to

Download sample

Download