Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of the Xen Hypervisor. There are also examples where to look at the Xen source code and some porting hints for bringing Xen to other platforms. If you look for a book about Xen administration or management then it is definitely not for you.

I'm a big fan of open source and virtualization, so I was probably predisposed to like this book, but it far exceeded my expectations.

By the way, this is a good looking book - the images here don't do it justice. Whoever was responsible for the cover deserves a nice bonus or promotion.

But on to the meat: I learned a lot here, and not just about Xen. Although it's obvious to me now, I never thought about the teaching opportunity presented by writing a paravirtualized kernel - since you aren't dealing with real hardware, a lot of the nastiness is taken away, leaving you free to concentrate on the more general OS issues. As the foreword points out, this book could be used as a text in an OS kernel course.

The author writes very well, and explains difficult concepts with grace and ease. This was very enjoyable to read, with (for me) just the right level of detail. Definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in kernel internals, and of course if you specifically need to know about Xen, this really is "The Definitive Guide".

In the past VMWare dominated the market, we took its hypervisor as is and as granted (but of course cost money). The book actually opens our eyes to the inner working not only hypervisor, but also the x86 hardware and certain aspects of OS. Great for readers interested on system programming.
Longing that the author can cover more on HVM topics as well on 2nd edition.

Amazing book for anyone who wants to know about xen, in a very easy way.