Community creates a helpful guide to answer Xen questions

Virtualization can sometimes be a tricky technology to install and set up properly, depending on your environment and architecture.  And it doesn’t matter if you are working with VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, or any of the various implementations of Xen, problems can appear at any time on any platform.  So where do you go for help?  If you are working with the Xen hypervisor, a new community-based project may have the answers you need.

[ Find out more about virtualization with InfoWorld’s coverage of Red Hat virtual desktop technology heads into beta tests, and Top security concerns in a virtualization environment ]

As you know, Xen is an open source virtualization technology being developed by a community of users and organizations.  So who better to ask for help than the community itself?  Many of the answers to commonly asked questions around Xen can be found in the community mailing lists.  But navigating a long list of e-mail threads to find an answer to a question can prove to be quite tedious.  So for months now, Stephen Spector has been diligently collecting information and creating a weekly summary of the xen-users and xen-devel mailing lists over at the Xen.org community blog site to assist new and existing Xen community members with frequently asked questions.  Still, a weekly summary of answers isn’t quite optimal.

So Spector has taken this one step further by recently launching a first draft version of a new document being called the “Xen-Users Common Questions Guide.”  The document is a Xen.org community effort to gather the most commonly asked questions from the xen-users e-mail list and other support tools to assist new and experienced Xen hypervisor users with problems that frequently arise.

While working with Xen, this is a great document to have and to refer to when Murphy’s Law creeps up on you.  Currently, the guide discusses things such as support tools, guest-related questions, installation questions, networking concerns and problems, high availability issues, performance questions, and the document even goes into design challenges.

This is a living document that will only get better with time.  And the community is being asked to help keep it up to date with a growing list of questions and answers.  Download the document from Xen.org, and if you can help update the document, send an e-mail to Stephen Spector with the proposed information.

Don’t you love it when a community comes together?