Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization

This was the most helpful book I found on Xen and virtualization in general. It's very well presented and gives some good examples. It's good as a tutorial. It's good as a reference. Well organized and presented.

I was thrown into the Xen world and reached for what I could to read. I read one book and found it rather lacking for explaining "what's under the hood."The books is now dated. It mentions Xen version 3.0 and a few products that don't exist anymore. Having said that I still found it useful for background information. The book was written well for it's time as it covers both the novice and experienced user.This book covers the Xen architecture and the management tools. There are the usual output examples.There is also the explanation to setting up and establishing guests. Probably the best part for me was the Dom0 discussion and the endless links throughout the book. The networking side was a little basic and the same for device virtualization.Just for fun; the charters are:1) Xen--Background and Virtualization Basics2) A Quick Tour with the Xen LiveCD3) The Xen Hypervisor4) Hardware Requirements and Installation of Xen Domain05) Using Prebuilt Guest Images6) Managing Unprivileged Domains7) Populating Guest Images8) Storing Guest Images9) Device Virtualization and Management10) Network Configuration11) Securing a Xen System12) Managing Guest Resources.13) Guest Save, Restore, and Live Migration14) An Overview of Xen Enterprise Mangement Tools.Overall, it's an ok book as it's dated. However, I did find it useful for a background information.

The review copy I had was only 583 pages, not the 624 that the specs say this has. I bring that up because I wonder if last minute updates were added, and I mention that because that was my first thought when reading this: it's out of date.I don't mean horribly, and I certainly don't mean so much as to make this useless. But this is a common problem in the fast moving field of open source: things can change radically in the time it takes to get a book out the door.For example, the first thing I learned here was about a Xen LiveCD. Chapter 2 is devoted to playing with that, and it's a great idea: a non-threatening, very quick intro to Xen. Unfortunately, that's wayout of date: the LiveCD can still be found, but it's not where the book says it is because it is several versions old now.However, I'm sure that much of this book will remain useful for some time. This isn't just technical details (though there is a lot of that); it's also advice on configuration and deployment.As is common nowadays, the book includes a coupon to get 45 days free access to the on-line Safari version (interestingly, that doesn't have 624 pages either).

I bought this as a distress purchase since I wanted to take a book about Xen on a trip, and this was the only one I could find. It goes out of its way to make everything confusing and complicated. Instead of saying "if you want to do X, proceed as follows", it says "If you want to do X, here are numerous ways of doing Y, oh and by the way this one almost does X, sort of". Not to mention warnings of what can go wrong - without telling you what to do if they do. If it was a cookbook, it would say "Chop the meat into half-inch cubes using a sharp knife. Beware that knives may cut you, or damage other items in your kitchen, and may result in amputation. If you should amputate a finger, be sure to pack it in ice and take it with you." Incidentally my copy was badly made, with (ironically) a highly imperfect Perfect binding. Luckily I don't plan to use it much, because it won't take long for the pages to start falling out. The writing style is inconsistent (not surprising given the number of authors). There are several other books about Xen, buy one of those instead.

Running Xen ReviewRunning 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.

Fundamentally a very good book, containing a very useful overview of different kinds of virtualization and various implementations thereof, followed by detailed instructions for using Xen for typical virtualization-related tasks. Note that it predates quite a few improvements to libvirt, so if you are looking for up to date libvirt guidance, look elsewhere.It contains a few passages that are unnecessarily repetitive, or that the copy-editor seems to have skipped, and for this I have docked it one star.

Das Buch ist gut sich einen Überblick zum Einsatz von XEN zu gewinnen. Man muss halt etwas eigene Recherche betreiben sich die aktuelle Fassung von XEN zu holen. Es behandelt den Einsatz des hypervisors in Servern, nicjht aber das jetzt neue und sehr aktuelle Thema der Verwendung von Virtualisierung als Teil der Schutzmassnahmen in mit dem Internet verbundenen IoT Geräten und vergleichbare.