PUBLIC MARKS with tags xen & tools

Xen is a GPLed virtualization solution available in Debian 4.0 Etch repositories. This article help you to create a coherent Xen installation, with backups and minimum security enhancements. This guide fits my vision of a Xen setup. If it does not fit yours, you are free to adapt it to your needs, or to not use it. For information In this guide, i use the term "virtual host". Be aware that Xen use its own terminology. In a Xen setup, instanciated (aka. started) virtual hosts are called "Domains". Once your computer configured for Xen, all the operating systems run in "domains". The original operating system, where the Xen's control tools are installed, is called "dom0" (for domain No zero). All the guest operating systems are said to be installed in a "domU" (for User domain). As i'm a little lazy (well, yeah... very lazy), i don't want to endure this mind twisting, and i will mainly use the "virtual host" term in this guide. So, if you read this guide, don't by angry at me because of the terms i use.

While consolidating physical to virtual machines using Xen,we want to be able to deploy and manage virtual machines in the same way we manage and deploy physical machines. For operators and support people there should be no difference between virtual and physical installations. Integrating Virtual Machines with the rest of the infrastructure, should have a low impact on the existing infrastructure. Typically, Virtual machine vendors have their own tools to deploy and manage virtual machines. Apart from the vendor lock-in to that specific virtual machine platform , it requires the administrators to learn yet another platform that they need to understand and manage, something we want to prevent. This paper discusses how we integrated SystemImager with Xen, hence creating a totally open source deployment framework for the popular open source Virtual Machine monitor. We will document both development of our tools and go more in depth on other infrastructure related issues when using Xen System Imaging environments in combination with Virtual machines can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production environment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image on the virtual machines with a simple update command! Xen has become one of the most popular virtualisation platforms over the last year, although not such a young project, it is now rapidly gaining acceptance in the corporate world as a valuable alternative to VMWare.

Today XenSource adds to its commercial offering two new solutions: XenServer and XenExpress. Both are based on the Xen open source hypervisor, and both features the management tools already powering the XenEnteprise solution.