Professional Xen® Virtualization

Chapter 9. Advanced Virtual Machine Configuration

Up to this point, most of this book has focused on providing background information, helping you get Xen installed on your domain0 system, and getting your first few domainU guests up and running. Assuming that all of this has been successful, this section dives into some advanced topics. Some of these topics are optimization-related (tweaking GRUB settings, managing memory, and so on), and others are procedural topics about tasks that you don't have to worry about right away, but which will probably become important to you as you expand and fine-tune your Xen implementation (how to add new hardware in domain0 and use it in domainU systems, how to work with X, and how to use Xen security policies). This chapter is still hands-on. The next chapter focuses on the more theoretical aspects of rolling out Xen: integrating it with your policies, SLAs, and procedures; and so on.

Note

This chapter discusses many different configuration settings for paravirtualized and HVM Xen guests. If you are using Xen's lifecycle management from the command line or a configuration tool (such as virt-manager) that stores its configuration information in the XenStore, you will need to update the XenStore configuration information for a domain before this new setting will actually take effect. This is most easily done from the command line by backing up your configuration information in XML or SXP format, deleting the old configuration by domainU name, and ...