Book Image

Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide

By : Daniele Tosatto
Book Image

Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide

By: Daniele Tosatto

Overview of this book

Virtualization helps an organization reduce costs and achieve low maintenance. It is fast becoming an important skill for all administrators. Citrix's XenServer is one of the leading virtualization solutions for enterprises and helps companies reduce costs while allowing them to integrate, automate and easily manage their datacenters. It comes with a steep learning curve, but the results are well worth the effort. This practical guide on XenServer administration shows you how to manage XenServer pools; create, configure and manage virtual machines and a datacenter. With the help of real-world examples in this book, you will be able to apply these concepts directly in your everyday life. Packed with author's tips and helpful advice; the book is your best choice for anything related to XenServer administration. This is the only book that focuses on the most vital aspect of XenServerñadministration. You don't have to struggle through the lesser-documented tasks anymore, this book will provide all the information you need to create and run a perfectly designed datacenter using XenServer.You will begin your journey towards becoming an expert XenServer administrator by configuring XenServer pools and managing role-based user authentication. Your next step is to create and manage virtual machines. In the following chapters you will learn to configure storage. The book discusses some of the more difficult tasks like configuring and managing VM memory. In the end you will be capable of handling your datacenter and virtual machines through a network, and you will learn how to monitor and backup your XenServer setup. All through the book, the author adds his helpful tips and advice that will help you choose the best options for your setup.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Storage overview


XenServer is able to manage different types of storage, locally and remotely connected. Before discovering how storage is configured and managed by XenServer, we will review some storage concepts.

Virtual machines use disk resources allocated to them by the XenServer host, through Control Domain (Dom0). These disk resources are parts of real disk space available as a Storage Repository. Because XenServer is based on Linux, it is a good idea to review how Linux manages disk storage. In Linux, typically the physical disk itself is split into partitions and it is accessed through a device file.

As an example, for the first Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) disk on the system, the device filename might be /dev/sda (SCSI disk "a"). Partitions of that disk will have device filenames such as /dev/sda1, and /dev/sda2/dev is the directory that contains all the device files.

Typically, when the system boots, a disk is automatically mounted over /, which is the root directory of...