XenServer and XenCenter

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XenServer

Why do we Blog about XenServer and XenCenter?

First, a quick bit about why we chose XenServer

We are small users of the XenServer and XenCenter software, and when we were first evaluating the Hyper Visor, we didn’t know much at all about Virtualizing servers.
At the same time as we were looking at XenServer, we were also looking into HyperV and VMWare. Of the 3, I found the open source model that XenServer had, backed by Cytrix’s large company status, to be the most appealing.
XenServer was also what Amazon AWS was based on, and with our experience with AWS it helped us lean towards XenServer.
To add to this, the XenCenter software was very simple to use, way that we were able to quickly create and manage Pools of servers and simply connect to the console seemed to address the features we would need, and not overcomplicate it like the VM Ware software did. An I liked the simple fast interface.

And finally, since we dont like to have Windows or GUI interfaces in our windows environment,   we loved that the Hypervisor is a Linux install we can log into and run ‘xe’ command on..  This makes XenServer is very scriptable.

XenServer is scriptable

Looking back and why we have created so many blog posts about XenServer is simply, because it is so easy to do.   As we have run into things that we have had difficulty doing,  it has been simple to document the process of figuring it out,    We have the option to simply cut and paste our command line history.   This seem so much easier than creating picture snippets of a GUI based management system,  and it makes it simple to turn our documentation of the process of troubleshooting an issue into a blog post.

Solutions to Problems are easy to forget

When we find a solution to a problem,  they can be very easy to implement and forget.  What happens here is that we end up doing the same research a year later to find a solution to a problem.   This is one of the reasons that many of our blog posts are not polished,   the posts just read like a stream of consciousness troubleshooting session.   We are not expert article writers,  we are expert Website Developers, Server Administrators and technical implementers.   However we recognized that when we solve a difficult problem,  if we document that problem in a place that is easy to find (our own blog) we can easily come back to it.    We simply search our own blog for it.

All of our blog topics

So really,  the reasons above apply to many of our blog topics.

  • Easy to script,  or describe in text (without pictures of it) we are able to cut and paste
  • Solution is one that we want to easily be able to find and solve again

Examples of XenServer Blog Posts