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

Protection and recovery of virtual machines


After we have learned how to backup XenServer pool database metadata, we have to discover how to backup virtual machines.

To do this, we can use the Virtual Machine Protection and Recovery feature. It provides a simple backup and restore utility for our VMs.

Note

This feature is available in Citrix XenServer Advanced Edition or higher.

This feature consists of regular scheduled snapshots that are taken automatically according to pool-wide virtual machine protection policies and can be used to restore VMs in case of disaster. These snapshots can be archived to a remote network shared folder or to an NFS share.

Note also that the best approach is to install backup agents on virtual machines just as if they are standard physical servers in order to perform backups of data stored on a virtual machine.

Creating a VM protection policy

You can create a protection policy related to VM protection and recovery using the New VM Protection Policy wizard and then...