Professional Xen® Virtualization

Chapter 7. Managing and Monitoring Virtual Machines

Xen provides a number of tools for creating, managing, and monitoring the status of domainU guests. Some of these are used internally by other Xen utilities, and some are intended for use by the system administrators, operators, and automated utilities that manage your enterprise IT infrastructure.

As Xen continues to grow in popularity and enterprise adoption, the number of virtual machines that are being used continues to expand, and the scenarios in which it is deployed become more complex. Effectively monitoring and managing a virtual infrastructure is a brass ring that many open software efforts and commercial software vendors are actively pursuing. In addition to Xen-specific management tools, many existing open-source system management and monitoring tools can easily be applied to Xen environments without requiring you to adopt and incorporate an entire new suite of multisystem management utilities.

This chapter focuses on providing a detailed discussion of the tools that are included with all standard Xen distributions, in order to provide information that will be useful to you regardless of which Linux distribution you are using in domain0 and your domainU guests. However, it would be doing everyone a disservice to ignore the excellent Xen-related work being done by specific Linux distributions, most notably in the Fedora and OpenSUSE environments that eventually feed into the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and ...