TABLE OF CONTENTS The sign of an enterprise-ready technology is an efficient tool to manage that technology. Xen is not any different. Many technologies that promised great potential to companies seeking to contain costs and simplify their operations suffered from poor management tools, leading to little, if any, adoption in the enterprise. This has never been more important than with virtualization products, such as Xen. Fortunately, Xen comes with a robust suite of tools, both command-line as well as GUI.
In this chapter, we will review the native management tools that are available. Tool syntax and options will be explored as well as best practices and use cases for each one. In particular, we will thoroughly review the Administrator Console, used to manage XenExpress, XenServer, and XenEnterprise.
Whereas the Administrator Console GUI provides a comprehensive set of functions for managing Xen hosts, virtual machines (VMs), and storage, the command-line interfaces (CLIs) complement and expand that functionality.
The xe CLI, which is on all Xen hosts and is installed on the Administrator Console, provides an efficient way to automate functionality by incorporating or wrapping the commands within scripting languages. However, the xe CLI does not provide all the functionality of the sm and xm interfaces, present only on the Xen hosts. Additional scripting can be done directly on the Xen hosts to ease administration tasks.
Because there is a choice of tools for different functions, administrators should select a tool based on their operational conditions.
