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

Authenticating users with Active Directory


We have understood that if you want to have multiple user accounts and manage different levels of access for these users on a server or a pool, you must use Active Directory. This lets XenServer users log in to a pool using their Windows domain credentials. Before discovering how to enable Active Directory authentication, we have to introduce some concepts regarding authentication.

Access is controlled by the use of subjects. A subject in XenServer maps to an entity on your Active Directory server. This entity can be either a user or a group belonging to your Active Directory domain. When external authentication is enabled, the credentials used to create a session are first checked against the local root credentials (in case your directory server is unavailable) and then against the subject list. To permit access, you must create a subject entry for the person or group you wish to grant access to. This can be done using XenCenter or the xe CLI....