Customer Reviews

Virtualization with Xen(tm): Including XenEnterprise, XenServer, and XenExpress

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

 

 

I was going to purchase the book, but decided to find it in the book store and give it a browse. After about 20 minutes, I decided not to purchase.

The book may be ok for beginners, but it lacks in technical depth. Once you read about the history of virtualization, the various versions of Xen, and the GUI install, you are half way through the book. There is also very little in terms of reference material, so it's really just a one-time read.

Xen development is moving at a fairly rapid pace, so the book will soon be dated. I can't recommend it to anyone except those without any *nix or virtualization experience.

I am about halfway this book, and think it is very good.
After some history about previous virtualizations (they forgot Amdahl's MDF, after which IBM startet LPAR's), they start explaining how to get XEN working, very nicely with good examples and giving backgrounds. This book is perfectly suited for experienced UNIX skilled people who want to learn a lot of the different ins and outs of XEN.

I have been waiting to pickup this book for some time now. And it was worth the wait. The because covers every aspect of the Xen hypervisor in an exhaustive manner. As a bonus, the books also contains thought-invoking chapters on the benefits and future of virtualization.

The book covers the commercial side of Xen from XenSource, including the free XenExpress which is included on CD. But there's information on installing and managing the open source hypervisor as well. The chapter on advanced concepts covers configurations that allow you to extract further value from Xen.

Strongly recommended for beginners and the seasoned with virtualization, or if you just want to learn more about Xen.

I was a little bit disappointed by this book. I was hoping for something that would not only cover the use of Xen, but also the design of Xen, and some implementatation details as well. Implementation details were entirely lacking. Design was only covered briefly. There is some background material on virtualization, but it does not go into detail. Much of the book consists of large screenshots of GUI tools being used. That, coupled with a larger-than-normal font size and a good amount of between-line whitespace leads to there not being much substance for this rather costly book. At the very least, there should have been a thorough discussion of Xen configuration files, but all they included was dump of a few configuration files that were produced by the GUI interface and some brief explanation. For example, there was little discussion of the differences between the block drivers for phy, file, and tap:aio. A discussion of these drivers and the relative performance is essential. There's only the briefest discussion of PyGrub, which is also important to understand when setting up configuration files. There should have been more discussion of the dom0 kernel and user-mode drivers and how they interact. Troubleshooting information and notes on how to interpret the Xen log files would have been useful. Finally the publisher watermarked "FAQ" behind the FAQ section at the end of each chapter, which is just plain annoying.