"Running Xen" - New Xen Book

While looking at the referring sites in the blog metrics for an earlier post,I just came across a site for a new Xen book called "Running Xen". This book is written by a member of the faculty (Jeanna Neefe Matthews) and several grad students (including a current IBMer) at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. The book is primarily focused on the open source hypervisor, but there is additional content on Citrix XenServer as well.

Here is a description of the book from the website -

We began using Xen in Fall 2003 soon after reading the paper "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" published in the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). After attending SOSP and talking to some of the authors, Jeanna Matthews returned excited about Xen. She and her graduate operating systems course at Clarkson University decided to repeat and extend the results reported in that paper. That class included two of the co-authors for this book, Eli Dow (currently at IBM) and Todd Deshane (currently completing his Ph.D.), who were both studying for their Master's degrees at the time. In the process of repeating the results from the 2003 Xen paper, we learned a lot about running Xen - much of it the hard way! Our goal for this book was to write exactly the material we wished was available when we first started using Xen.

In July 2004, we published the paper "Xen and the Art of Repeated Research" describing our experience with Xen and presenting the results we obtained repeating and extending the results. All the authors, in addition to being a part of the Fall 2003 graduate operating systems course, were also members of the Applied Computing Laboratories at Clarkson University specifically the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI) and the Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL). These labs were founded to provide students with hands-on experience with cutting-edge computing technologies and to form a community in which everyone both learns and teaches. Other students in the labs - both graduate and undergraduate - began to use Xen as the basis for both production systems and for research projects. Through the years, we have used Xen as the basis for a number of academic papers as well as the basis of award winning team projects. In the process, we have learned a lot about running Xen. It is our goal in this book to share this knowledge with you and to make your experience running Xen as smooth and simple as possible.

Here is the chapter list from the site -

Chapter 1 - Xen: Background and Virtualization Basics
Chapter 2 - A Quick Tour with the Xen LiveCD
Chapter 3 - The Xen Hypervisor
Chapter 4 - Hardware Requirements and Installation of Xen Dom0
Chapter 5 - Using Prebuilt Guest Images
Chapter 6 - Managing Unprivileged Domains
Chapter 7 - Populating Guest Images
Chapter 8 - Storing Guest Images
Chapter 9 - Device Virtualization and Management
Chapter 10 - Network Configuration
Chapter 11 - Securing a Xen System
Chapter 12 - Managing Guest Resources
Chapter 13 - Guest Save, Restore, and Migration
Chapter 14 - Xen in the Enterprise: A Brief Survey
Appendix A - Resources
Appendix B - The xm command
Appendix C - Xend Configuration Parameters
Appendix D - Guest Configuration Parameters
Appendix E - Xen Performance Evaluation

The Running Xen web site has a page with multiple sites where the book can be purchased here. If you get the book and read it (or already have) I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

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