Download Chapter 7: "Hosting Untrusted Users Under Xen: Lessons from the Trenches"

Xen, the open source virtualization tool, is a system administrator's dream. Xen is a free, high-performance virtual machine monitor that lets you consolidate your hardware and finally put those unused cycles to use—without sacrificing reliability, performance, or scalability.

The Book of Xen explains everything you need to know in order to use Xen effectively, including installation, networking, memory management, and virtualized storage. You'll also learn how to use Xen and standard Linux tools to take snapshot backups, perform QoS operations on network traffic, and limit over-aggressive disk users.

Authors Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford show you how to:

• Provide virtual hosting for dozens of users, each with their own individual needs
• Install and manage multiple guests, including various flavors of Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, and Windows
• Choose the right virtual storage options for your needs
• Migrate your systems seamlessly and create new images
• Tune and benchmark your systems to make them as fast as possible
• Troubleshoot Xen's most common problems like network and memory management

Expert advice is priceless when it comes to running a complicated open source virtualization technology like Xen. You'll get the advice you need in The Book of Xen.

Chris Takemura is a longtime *nix sysadmin, Perl hacker, and technological hobbyist. He's been using Xen from its early days, and helped to build prgmr.com's reputation as "hosting for the technically adept."

Luke S. Crawford has used virtualization in production since before it was cool, virtualizing hundreds of servers for large and small corporations. He launched the prgmr.com VPS service in 2005, selling virtual servers based on FreeBSD jails before switching to Xen in an effort to more fairly allocate resources.