The Book of Xen—New from No Starch Press
The System Administrator's Guide to Virtualization with Xen

San Francisco, CA, October 14, 2009—Xen is a system administrator's dream come true: a high quality, high performance virtual machine monitor. Xen lets sysadmins consolidate their machines and finally put those unused cycles to use, saving money on hardware, maintenance, and electricity—without sacrificing reliability, performance, or scalability.

The Book of Xen (No Starch Press, October 2009, 312 pp., $49.95, ISBN 9781593271862) gives readers both theoretical discussions of Xen's underpinnings and practical examples of Xen in action. Expert authors Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford begin with a high-level overview of Xen and then delve into the advanced details, like installation, networking, memory management, and virtualized storage. They also explain how to use Xen and standard Linux tools to take snapshot backups, perform QoS operations on network traffic, and limit over-aggressive disk users.

"Xen is cool stuff, but it's also deep and wide and dense," said Paul Vixie, architect of BIND and president of Internet Systems Consortium. "Luke and Chris have unscrambled Xen into the linear form of a printed book in about the best way I can imagine anybody doing it."

The Book of Xen teaches readers 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 option
• Migrate their systems seamlessly and create new images
• Tune and benchmark their systems to make them as fast as possible
• Troubleshoot Xen's most common problems like network and memory management

Takemura and Crawford are long-time Xen consultants and use the technology extensively in their hosting company, prgmr.com. In The Book of Xen, they share their hard-won experience with verve and style. And when it comes to running a complicated open source virtualization technology like Xen, expert advice is priceless.

For more information or to request a review copy of The Book of Xen, contact Travis Peterson at No Starch Press ([email protected], +1.415.863.9900, x300), or visit www.nostarch.com.

About the Authors
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.

Additional Resources
Chapter 7: "Hosting Untrusted Users Under Xen: Lessons from the Trenches" (PDF)
Table of contents overview
Detailed table of contents (PDF)
Index (PDF)
Large cover image

The Book of Xen
by Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford
October 2009, 312 pp
ISBN 9781593271862, $49.95 USD
[email protected]
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

Available in fine bookstores everywhere, from www.oreilly.com/nostarch, or directly from No Starch Press (http://www.nostarch.com/, [email protected], 1-800-420-7240).

About No Starch Press
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