Chapter 1. Overview

Table of Contents

1.1. XenServer Hosts and Resource Pools
1.2. Networking
1.3. Storage
1.4. Command Line Interface
1.5. How this Guide Relates to Other Documentation

This document is an administrator's guide to XenServer™, the platform virtualization solution from XenSource™. It describes the tasks involved in configuring a XenServer deployment -- in particular, how to set up storage, networking and resource pools, and how to administer XenServer Hosts using the xe command line interface (CLI).

This section summarizes the rest of the guide so that you can find the information you need. The following topics are covered:

XenServer Hosts and resource pools
XenServer network configuration
XenServer storage configuration
XenServer command line interface

1.1. XenServer Hosts and Resource Pools

A resource pool is a connected group of XenServer Hosts that, combined with shared storage, provides a platform on which VMs run. VMs can be started on different hosts within the resource pool, and can even be live migrated between pool hosts in order to minimize downtime.

The Hosts and Resource Pools chapter introduces the concept of resource pools and describes how to:

add and remove hosts from pools;
create shared storage and attach it to a pool;
start VMs on different hosts within a pool;
live migrate running VMs between hosts within a pool.