On Dec 17, 2007, at 10:23 AM, James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
When are you going to write your _Virtualization Recipes_ book?
Hehe I'm tempted to write more of this down because the documentation out there *is* very scattered, and quite a bit of it is inaccurate. Maybe some blog or wiki posts...
In the case of Xen, this was not helped by huge changes in capability and configuration format between Xen 2.x and Xen 3.x. Many of the mailing list or wiki posts you find do not specify which version they were intended for (though dates on the post will often give a clue), so trial and error becomes the norm.
I must say that this lack of documentation also seems to extend to the commercial XenServer product. I went to print the PDF documentation for this new XenServer Enterprise install so I could give a copy to the local admin, and was shocked when the stack on the printer totaled only 70 double-sided pages. That includes the host installation guide, the guest installation guide (covering Windows and Linux), and the full administrator's guide. Let's just say that the basics are covered, but there is no "best-practices" advice and definitely no troubleshooting coverage. Better have that support contract...
This is a bit of a shock when you compare to VMware, which provides a number of best practices guides that each clock in at 100+ pages, not to mention the scads of actual (excellent) product documentation.
Hopefully Citrix will put some of their doc writers on to the Xen team. Meanwhile, I'll document what I can. :)
-- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
