For those of us who have been working in the virtualization industry
since its earliest days, it’s hard to imagine what datacenters were like
without virtualization. Still, there are some organizations that have
yet to adopt virtualization within their datacenter. With the release of
VMware vSphere 5, VMware’s fl agship enterprise-class virtualization
solution, VMware aims to change that reality.
However, even though virtualization has many benefi ts—not the
least of which include reducing your hardware footprint, enabling faster
server provisioning, and simplifying disaster recovery—some people
feel that virtualization also has a steep learning curve. IT professionals
who want to become more familiar with virtualization need to learn
about terms like vMotion, vSphere Distributed Switch, vSphere Fault
Tolerance, and VMkernel interfaces. All these new terms and new
technologies can seem confusing to someone not familiar with how all
the pieces fi t together.
In addition, virtualization sometimes forces IT professionals to think
differently about how to solve old challenges. The “traditional” way of
doing things often isn’t the best way of handling something after you’ve
virtualized your datacenter.
This book is intended to help address these concerns. For administrators
who might be new to virtualization, this book explains how virtualization
works, what the components are, and how these components fi t
together—in a hands-on, how-to approach. We believe this approach will
help new vSphere administrators get up to speed quickly.
For administrators who are familiar with previous versions of
VMware’s virtualization product suite but not VMware vSphere 5, this
book will fi ll in the gaps through the step-by-step review of vSphere’s
new features and functionality—such as vSphere Web Client Server.
While this book isn’t an in-depth, highly technical view of VMware
vSphere—that’s what you’ll fi nd in Mastering VMware vSphere 5,
also from Sybex—it is a comprehensive reference guide for fi nding
information quickly, just when you need it. We hope that it will earn its
place on your reference bookshelf as a book to which you can return
when you need a little extra guidance on how something works or how
to perform a task within VMware vSphere.