Xen Virtualization: A fast and practical guide to supporting multiple operating systems with the Xen hypervisor (Paperback)

A fast and practical guide to supporting multiple operating systems with the Xen hypervisor

• Installing and configuring Xen
• Managing and administering Xen servers and virtual machines
• Setting up networking, storage, and encryption
• Backup and migration

In Detail

Xen is an open-source paravirtualization technology that provides a platform for running multiple operating systems on one physical hardware resource, while providing close to native performance. Xen supports several operating systems--Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and NetBSD. It enables you to easily test, deploy and run your software and services on multiple operating systems with resource isolation and great performance. It is also a terrific way to consolidate your servers, save hardware and maintenance costs, and minimize downtime. Xen is one of the most popular open source projects in the world and vendors like IBM, Sun, HP, RedHat and Novell are working on integrating Xen into their Linux servers.

Xen was originally developed in 2003 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and we now have both commercial and free versions of the Xen hypervisor. The commercial versions are built on top of the open-source version with additional enterprise features. In this book we explore and use the open-source version of Xen.

This concise handbook is ideal for professionals who want a user-friendly reference beside them while they get working with Xen and virtualization. Its easy-to-navigate content offers bite-sized walkthroughs for a wide variety of common virtualization tasks using Xen. We use Fedora Core as the host operating system in this book. The book shows you how to add Xen support to it, leads you through the creation of guest domains running different operating systems and follows up by dissecting a range of common virtualization tasks.

What you will learn from this book?

• Getting started with virtualization and Xen
• Installing Xen from pre-built packages using yum
• Installing and compile Xen from source
• Running guest domains under Xen:
• Create Ubuntu guest domain using debootstrap
• Create NetBSD domain using install image
• Create a Centos image using Qemu
• Create Slackware domain using domU image from jailtime
• Managing remote Xen instances using:
• Xen manager (xm)
• XenMan
• Virt-manager
• Configuring Xen for networking
• Connecting domains using:
• Bridged networking--uses network bridge and hardware MAC addresses
• Routed networking--uses Dom0 for all traffic
• Implementing storage solutions for guest domains:
• Using Files--file based; perfect for testing
• Using Network File Systems (NFS)--works with remote NFS server
• Using Logical Volume Management (LVM)--for enterprise-grade storage
• Securing your domain by encrypting root file systems
• Plain device mapper-based encryption
• Key-based device mapper encryption using LUKS
• Migrating live domains from one server to another
• Saving and restoring a domain
• Trends and forthcoming advances in the Xen world:
• libvirt to simplify access to virtualization domains in a vendor/hypervisor-independent way
• VMcasting for transferring virtual machine images from the server to the client using RSS 2.0

Approach

Each chapter is a collection of practical tasks that demonstrate how to achieve common virtualization tasks--you then learn how it works so that you can apply this knowledge to your Xen installation and environment.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for Linux administrators who want to use Xen virtualization for development, testing, virtual hosting, or operating systems training.