More todo! (The copyediting phase is, after all, the best time to add new sections.)
I want to nail down in my mind, for certain and absolute, whether it is possible to control xen remotely, and if so, how. Virt-manager seems to allow it, but I haven't found the knobs to twiddle that make it work. This would be useful to allow, for example, a centralized console server for the customer domains.
This is probably related to the XenAPI in some way.
This one's a reminder -- we're considering pulling the firewalling bits out of the hosting chapter, expanding them, and putting them into a discussion of dom0 firewalling in the networking chapter. The idea is that there are substantiative differences between firewalling in the Xen case and in the ordinary case -- with Xen, we want to firewall the dom0 but let the domUs have unfiltered access to the network.
Discussion of shaping will most likely still go in hosting.
Even though storage is technically kind of finalized, I want to add a few lines on falling through to custom block devices. (There's already a brief discussion, but a more concrete example might help.)
We could refer to the block-iscsi script described at http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2007-11/msg00782.html
Today I reduced the stratospheric level of procrastination in which I've been indulging by actually getting pypxeboot and cobbler set up and working. It's really amazingly slick -- a single command provisions a VM and writes a config file.
However, I'm not sure how useful this really is in the Xen context. It does integrate very well with a "bare metal" provisioning system (like kickstart.) One of the nice things about Xen, though, is that you can just copy disk images around, or dd one physical device to another. If you've already got a fully-configured pxeboot-based system running on your network, this is useful. If not, it's probably easier to just write some short scripts.
I've got to admit, though, RedHat has a slick product.
I just realized that "cobbler" is a pun based on "kickstart" . . . shoes. . . kick. . . my word, RedHat, that isn't funny at all.
