About
Contact Us
Thank you for your interest in our book! Questions and feedback are greatly appreciated.
For general questions and feedback, or to submit an inaccuracy, please direct e-mails to:
contact (nojunkplease) @runningxen.com.
Also, individual authors may be contacted by sending an e-mail to the author’s:
first_name@runningxen.com.
History
We began using Xen in Fall 2003 soon after reading the paper “Xen and the Art of Virtualization” published in the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). After attending SOSP and talking to some of the authors, Jeanna Matthews returned excited about Xen. She and her graduate operating systems course at Clarkson University decided to repeat and extend the results reported in that paper. That class included two of the co-authors for this book, Eli Dow (currently at IBM) and Todd Deshane (currently completing his Ph.D.), who were both studying for their Master’s degrees at the time. In the process of repeating the results from the 2003 Xen paper, we learned a lot about running Xen – much of it the hard way! Our goal for this book was to write exactly the material we wished was available when we first started using Xen.
In July 2004, we published the paper “Xen and the Art of Repeated Research” describing our experience with Xen and presenting the results we obtained repeating and extending the results. All the authors, in addition to being a part of the Fall 2003 graduate operating systems course, were also members of the Applied Computing Laboratories at Clarkson University specifically the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI) and the Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL). These labs were founded to provide students with hands-on experience with cutting-edge computing technologies and to form a community in which everyone both learns and teaches. Other students in the labs – both graduate and undergraduate – began to use Xen as the basis for both production systems and for research projects. Through the years, we have used Xen as the basis for a number of academic papers as well as the basis of award winning team projects. In the process, we have learned a lot about running Xen. It is our goal in this book to share this knowledge with you and to make your experience running Xen as smooth and simple as possible.
About The Authors
Jeanna Neefe Matthews is an associate professor of Computer Science at Clarkson University (Potsdam, New York) where she leads several hands-on computing laboratories including the Clarkson Open Source Institute and Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory. Students in these labs and in her classes have been winners in a number of prestigious computing contests including the 2001, 2002 and 2004 IBM Linux Challenge, the 2005 IBM North American Grid Scholar’s Challenge, the 2005 Unisys Tuxmaster competition and the 2006 VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge. Her research interests include virtualization, operating systems, computer networks and computer security. She is actively involved in the Association for Computing Machinery as treasurer of the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems, editor of Operating Systems Review and as a member of the Executive Committee ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee, US-ACM. She is also the author of a computer networking textbook, “Computer Networking: Internet Protocols in Action”, that has been translated into several languages. Jeanna received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999.
Eli M. Dow is a software engineer in IBM’s Test and Integration Center for Linux in Poughkeepsie, NY. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science and psychology as well as a M.S. in computer science from Clarkson University. He is passionate about open source software and is an alumnus and founding member of the Clarkson Open Source Institute. His interests include Virtualization, Linux systems programming, the GNOME desktop, and human-computer interaction. He is the author of numerous IBM developerworks articles focused on Linux and open source software. Additionally he has coauthored two books on the mainframe hypervisor z/VM, entitled “Introduction to the New Mainframe: z/VM Basics” and “Linux for IBM System z9 and IBM zSeries”. His first published experience with Xen was coauthoring an early academic paper entitled “Xen and the art of repeated research”. Recently he has focused on developing highly available, enterprise customer solutions deployed on virtualized Linux using the z/VM hypervisor.
Todd Deshane expects to attain a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Clarkson University in 2008. He also has a Master of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering from Clarkson. While at Clarkson University, he has had a variety of research publications – many involving Xen. In 2005, a project that was based on Todd’s Masters thesis – an open source collaborative, large database explorer – won first place in the UNISYS TuxMasters Invitational. Todd’s primary academic and research interests are in the area of operating system technologies, such as virtual machine monitors, high availability, and file systems. His doctoral dissertation focuses on using these technologies to provide desktop users with an attack-resistant experience, with automatic and autonomic recovery from viruses, worms, and adverse system modifications. During his PhD years, Todd has been a Teaching Assistant and an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship recipient. At IBM, Todd has worked on internship projects involving Xen and IBM technologies. Todd enjoys teaching, tutoring, and helping people.
Wenjin Hu graduated from Clarkson University in 2007 with the master degree of Computer Science and is currently working on his Ph.D. His master thesis was “A Study of the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems”. His research field is applying virtualization techniques to operating systems and security.
Jeremy Bongio is currently a Master’s student at Clarkson University. He won second place in the Unisys Tuxmaster Competition in 2005 with a project called Xenophilia, an early effort to make Xen more user friendly. He is a current member and former student director of the Clarkson Open Source Institute where he actively learns and experiments with different kinds of virtualization.
Patrick F. Wilbur is currently pursuing graduate studies in computer science at Clarkson University. His interests include operating systems, systems and application security, natural language processing, and home automation. In his spare time, Patrick enjoys composing music, experimenting with amateur radio, storm chasing, and working on various electronics, software, and carpentry projects around the house. He is currently a member of the Clarkson Open Source Institute, a volunteer at the Applied Computer Science Laboratories at Clarkson University, an emergency communications volunteer, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Brendan Johnson (not pictured above) graduated Clarkson University in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a minor in mathematics. Brendan continued his education at Clarkson University and obtained a Masters of Science in Computer Science with a thesis in quantum computing. Brendan is currently a senior software architect at Mobile Armor, a world leading “Data At Rest” encryption software company.
