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

Overview of virtual machines creation


Once you have deployed your XenServer infrastructure, you can start creating virtual machines (VMs).

Virtual machines can be created in different ways:

  • Using VM templates

  • Converting a physical machine to virtual

  • Importing an exported VM

  • Cloning an existing VM

We will introduce them here and discuss them in depth later in the chapter.

Using VM templates

Virtual machines are prepared from templates. A template is a virtual machine encapsulated into a file, making it possible to rapidly deploy new VMs. Each template contains installation metadata—the setup information needed to create a new VM with a specific guest operating system, and with the optimum storage, CPU, memory, and virtual network configuration.

XenServer provides you a set of templates out of the box—each of them is developed in order to run a specific operating system because Linux and Windows operating systems require several different settings in order to run optimally. VMs in a XenServer environment...