Customer Reviews

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

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Running Xen Review

Running 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

This book is just excellent! It is a MUST title in a system administrators library interested to learn everything about virtualization using Xen. The author explains all the most important features from Xen considering theory and practical aspects. If you want to learn Xen and if you would like to have in your library a good reference about this subject, just buy this book.

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. [...]

I just got this book and I am so glad! It has made my virtualization task so much easier. It brought me up to speed on virtualization and I really like the hands-on nature of the book. I have Xen up and running with my guest disk image and all seems well so far!

This book just has too many authors (7). There's so much disconnect between parargraphs within the chapters. Seems one persone would right a paragraph and then another would write the next and so on.

Multiple diagrams within the figures that are not expounded upon.