Provisioning and Managing your Xen Guests
There are some good options for managing your Xen DomU hosts if you if you are not using the interface provided by XenSource. The XenSource solution is a complete operating system and hypervisor that is installed on the physical computer, this is good in some ways and not in others. The Good: minimal space needed, there will not be any bloat-ware installed this way so you only get what you need, Native 64 bitXen Hypervisor and Live Migration with Resource Pools. The Not So Good: There is a limited amount of hardware and drivers officially tested (although if you have newer hardware you should be okay), if you want to do Clustering of the physical servers you may be on your own and have to compile clustering software yourself, limitations on how many virtual hosts you can run and feature set depending on how much money you want to spend on your solution.
Options if you are running Xen provided by your Linux Distro.
RedHat has a management interface called virt-manager using the libvirt Python bindings. If it is not already on your system in can be installed with yum or updatedb. If you are not local to your systems in which the Xen Hypervisor is running on, you will either need to do X forwarding over ssh or have some sort of basic desktop running that you can VNC into or install the same version of virt-manager on you local system. You need to make sure the versions are concurrent because they use different libvirt library versions for different virt-manager versions which are not compatible. So, if you have multiple Xen Hypervisors running, virt-manager may work well for you. Although, if you only plan on running virt-manager locally and connecting to remote hypervisors you only need to install libvirt on the remote system and make sure the libvirtd daemon is running.
XenMan, also known as ConVirt (Controlling Virtual Systems), is an app that needs to be run with X, this app is quite a bit more manageable forwarding X over ssh if you are not on a LAN. XenMan can also be run on your local linux system and the benefit of XenMan is that you do not need to install anything on the remote system beside Xen 3.0.2 or later booted into the Xen Kernel, Xend daemon running and listening for TCP connections and an SSH server with login permissions to control the Xend daemon ( an X server is not required). On the client side, Xen 3.0.2 or later needs to be installed, X Server, SSH Client to connect to the server, Paramiko Library and XenMan. Detailed installation of XenMan can be found on their SourceForge Site documentation section.
These are some other Provisioning and Management Tools also worth looking into, depending on your needs.
Qlusters OpenQRM
I have not tried OpenQRM yet, but is on my list of tools to test. OpenQRM goes beyond just manager VM’s to Provision physical machines, VM’s, or guests. It also monitors all of the major sub-systems including CPU, memory, disk and network. OpenQRM can also provide High Availability through rules and event triggers.
Cobbler
Provisioning Only.
Cobbler is a Linux boot server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. With a simple series of commands, network installs can be configured for PXE, reinstallations, and virtualized installs using Xen or KVM. Cobbler uses a helper program called ‘Koan’ (which interacts with Cobbler) for reinstallation and virtualization support.
Enomalism
Deploy and scale your applications without changing any code.
Provision, monitor and manage operations with just a web browser.
Scale from a fraction of a server to thousands of CPUs instantly.
Migrate to and from various virtual environments including VMware, Amazon EC2 and Xen.
Easily transition to a virtual environment with out the need for complex management software.
Novell Xenworks
Supports VMware, Xen and Microsoft
Discovers servers for virtual machine commissioning
Discovers off-line and online virtual machines
Provides deployment, re-deployment and rollback of virtual machines
Manages physical, virtual and storage compute nodes
ganeti
Support for Xen virtualization
Recommended cluster size 1-25 physical nodes
Disk management using either plain LVM volumes, local-disk raid1 mirrors or across-the-network raid1 (using DRBD) for quick recovery in case of physical system failure
Export/import mechanism for backup purposes or migration between clusters
