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

Rating:

- Solid Technical Intro to Xen and Virtualization
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.

Rating:

- Finally a Really Good Book on Xen
If you ever worked with Xen - Open Source Virtualization Software for Linux you probably realized that despite being powerful and performing well Xen is a complex solution that requires "reading the manual".

I think that "Running Xen" book ("A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization") will be a great help. It is written by the team of people who not only know Zen inside out, but who are also major contributors to the source.

The book is a hands-on guide for most popular distributions, but what I specially like is that it gives a very good theoretical background on virtualization (architecture, benefits, over of xen hypervisor etc). The hands-on section covers hardware requirements and software requirements, including specifics for the popular distributions (OpenSUSE, Centos (RHEL) and Ubuntu as well as notes on other Domain0 distributions.

Significant attention is given to managing of the custom installed or pre-built Guest images, management of unprivileged (guest) domains, storage, device virtualization, security, network configuration, management of guest resources, saving/restoration and live migrations.

What gives confidence while reading on these hands-on tasks is the authors' familiarity with the subject. They are people who know Xen inside out and many tips and notes you encounter will save you hours of browsing of mailing lists or trials and errors.

Rating:

- Encyclopedic coverage
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wonder if last minute updates were added, and I mention that because that was my first thought when reading this: it's out of date.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 way
out 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).

Rating:

- Review: Running Xen a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization
A few days ago I finally got my copy of Running Xen. I was anxious to see how the information would be presented. I can tell you I was not disappointed. I am by no means a Xen master. I have tinkered with it a few times over the past several years but as I am getting ready to use it full time in production I need as much information as I can get. The books authors include Eli Dow, and Todd Deshane who worked on Xen and the Art of Repeated Research, as well as Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems. [...]

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