My Book: Implementing Citrix XenServer Quickstarter

Implementing Citrix XenServer Quickstarter

Last week was a happy week for me since my book got published by Packt Publish, its really a big achievement for me to have a book published internationally on some technical topic. It feels awesome to be an author.

It all started from my blog post on Vyatta+OpenSIPS on Citrix XEN-Server when it caught attention of an Author Relation Executive from Packt Publishing, a well known publisher for technical books. I was contacted and was subsequently asked to write a 100 page book on the Citrix XenServer.

So my work with this book started around Oct,2012  A lot of things changed around me while writing this book; I changed my job, got married, got busy in personal startup as a vendor of a star product for a big Telecom here. And meanwhile all these, this book got a little bit delayed. I personally thank Yogesh Dalvi the Editor, and Sneha Modi the Project Coordinator of this book who tolerated with me throughout this book happily.

Summary of the Book:
As the title suggests this book is a Quick Starter guide for Citrix XenServer, anyone who knows about clouds and virtualization and wants to get involved with this wide spreading technologies should take this book as a beginner to interim level guide. Citrix is a giant leader in providing cloud based solutions, there are other great products as well see this link.

I've tried to keep things as simple as possible to understand and not use the really techy jargon. Like usual approach the starting chapters introduce the history of XenServer, and my personal introduction with virtualization. Since this is a quick starter book so the immediate goals are to setup a Citrix XenServer host and then find out what can be done to create virtual machines; where to place those virtual machines; storage concepts and their usage in our Virtual machines setup.
Daily maintenance like, creating and deploying snapshots, templates and importing virtual machines are covered besides topic like cloning, network connectivity,  and importance of XenServer tools.

This book explains the management of a VM resources like CPU, Memory, storage. Specialized networking concepts are also explained like Network pools, VLANs, NIC Bonding, and introduction to Virtual Switches and Routers. Advanced topics related to Citrix XenServer such as High Availability, Role Based Admin Control, and conversion of Physical machine to Virtual machine are briefly introduced in the last chapter.

Acknowledgements:
Besides being thankful to God, and my loving Parents, I'd like to say my heartiest thanks to my dear Wife who really helped me completing the last few lingering chapters, I love you my sweet Wife. Then I want to thank my colleagues and friends at Vopium who not only appreciated this book-writing but also helped me in multiple ways to dedicate my time on this book. I'm thankful to Mr. Husnain from HR team; Mr. Imran Iqbal   Head of Operations who appreciated, allowed, and applauded this activity; Mr. Haroon Scrum Master who provisioned me with only enough projects to be able to give time to writing this; Mr. Shahzad Senior Manager VoIP team as being my Mentor; then Mr. Abdul Basit, my Manager VoIP who gave me permissions and assisted me in starting up with this book. My friend Salman, Faheem, Rizwan, and Qasim who made fun of me and made me feel 'encouraged' to continue writing(:P).

Thank you all. I am really grateful and very much appreciate the help to avail this opportunity.