Xen Garden: securing an open environment with Xen virtualisation

Linh Vu 2007

Like in the nightmares of many system administrators, I inherited a wild "open environment" from my predecessors. It was a server room inundated with gray towers and old desktops masquerading as servers surrounding the quality rackmounted ones, which provides the perfect climate for the wild growth of various operating systems and applications with undocumented and often mismanaged configurations. This talk is a case study of the implementation of Xen virtualisation at a university department to restore service manageability and security, and most importantly, serenity in the life of a system administrator.

About Linh Vu

Linh Vu works as the system and web administrator at the Physics Department of the University of Melbourne. He is at the cowboy stage of the SDLC - Sysadmin Development Life Cycle - meaning he loves to explore new cool technologies with catchy names, and sneakily apply them in production before they pass rigorous enterprise quality testing for mission-critical spaceship launchers.