INTRODUCTION

We live in an exciting time. The information age is exploding around us, giving us access to dizzying amounts of data the instant it becomes available. Smartphones and tablets provide an untethered experience that offers streaming video, audio, and other media formats to just about any place on the planet. Even people who are not “computer literate” use Facebook to catch up with friends and family, use Google to research a new restaurant choice and get directions to drive there, or tweet their reactions once they have sampled the fare. The budding Internet of Things will only catalyze this data eruption. The infrastructure supporting these services is also growing exponentially, and the technology that facilitates this rapid growth is virtualization.

On one hand, virtualization is nothing more than an increasingly efficient use of existing resources that delivers huge cost savings in a brief amount of time. On the other, virtualization offers organizations new models of application deployment for greater uptime to meet user expectations, modular packages to provide new services in minutes instead of weeks, and advanced features that bring automatic load balancing, scalability without downtime, self-healing, self-service provisioning, and many other capabilities to support business-critical applications that improve on traditional architecture. Large companies have been using this technology for more than 15 years, while smaller and medium-sized businesses also now rely on these solutions. Newer companies may skip the movement altogether and jump directly to cloud computing, the next evolution of application deployment. Virtualization is the foundation for cloud computing as well.

This quantum change in our world echoes similar trends from our recent history as electrical power and telephony capabilities spread and then changed our day-to-day lives. During those periods, whole industries sprang up out of nothing, providing employment and opportunity to people who had the foresight and chutzpah to seize the moment. That same spirit and opportunity is available today as this area is still being defined and created right before our eyes. If not virtualization vendors, there are hardware partners that provide servers, networking vendors for connectivity, storage partners for data storage, and everyone provides services. Software vendors are designing and deploying new applications specifically for these new architectures. Third parties are creating tools to monitor and manage these applications and infrastructure areas. As cloud computing becomes the de facto model for development, deployment, and maintaining application services, this area will expand even further.

The first generation of virtualization specialists acquired their knowledge out of necessity: they were server administrators who needed to understand the new infrastructure being deployed in their data centers. Along the way, they picked up some networking knowledge to manage the virtual networks, storage knowledge to connect to storage arrays, and application information to better interface with the application teams. Few people have experience in all of those areas. Whether you have some virtualization experience or none at all, this text will give you the foundation to understand what virtualization is, why it is a crucial portion of today's and tomorrow's information technology infrastructure, and the opportunity to explore and experience one of the most exciting and key areas in technology today.

Good reading and happy virtualizing!

Who Should Read This Book

This text is designed to provide the basics of virtualization technology to someone who has little or no prior knowledge of the subject. This book will be of interest to you if you are an IT student looking for information about virtualization or if you are an IT manager who needs a better understanding of virtualization fundamentals as part of your role. Virtualization Essentials might also be of interest if you are an IT professional who specializes in a particular discipline (such as server administration, networking, or storage) and are looking for an introduction into virtualization or cloud computing as a way to advance inside your organization.

The expectation is that you have the following:

• Some basic PC experience
• An understanding of what an operating system is and does
• Conceptual knowledge of computing resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network)
• A high-level understanding of how programs use resources

This text would not be of interest if you are already a virtualization professional and you are looking for a guidebook or reference.

What You Need

The exercises and illustrations used in this text were created on a system with Windows 11 as the operating system. VMware Workstation Player version 16 is used as the virtualization platform. It is available as a free download from downloads.vmware.com/d. It is recommended that you have at least 2 GB of memory, though more will be better. The installation requires a minimum of 1.5 GB of disk storage, but virtual machines will require more. Also used is Oracle VirtualBox version 7. It is available as a free download from www.virtualbox.org. It is recommended that you have at least 2 GB of memory. VirtualBox itself requires only about 30 MB of disk storage, but virtual machines will require more.

The examples demonstrate the creation and use of two virtual machines: one running Windows 11, the other running Ubuntu Linux. You will need the installation media for those as well. Each of the virtual machines requires about 60 GB of disk space.

What Is Covered in This Book

Here's a glance at what is in each chapter.

• Chapter 1: Understanding Virtualization   Introduces the basic concepts of computer virtualization beginning with mainframes and continues with the computing trends that have led to current technologies.
• Chapter 2: Understanding Hypervisors   Focuses on hypervisors, the software that provides the virtualization layer, and compares some of the current offerings in today's marketplace.
• Chapter 3: Understanding Virtual Machines   Describes what a virtual machine is composed of, explains how it interacts with the hypervisor that supports its existence, and provides an overview of managing virtual machine resources.
• Chapter 4: Creating a Virtual Machine   Begins with the topic of converting existing physical servers into virtual machines and provides a walkthrough of installing VMware Workstation Player and Oracle VirtualBox, the virtualization platforms used in this text, and a walkthrough of the creation of a virtual machine.
• Chapter 5: Installing Windows on a Virtual Machine   Provides a guide for loading Microsoft Windows in the created virtual machine and then describes configuration and tuning options.
• Chapter 6: Installing Linux on a Virtual Machine   Provides a guide for loading Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine and then walks through a number of configuration and optimization options.
• Chapter 7: Managing CPUs for a Virtual Machine   Discusses how CPU resources are virtualized and then describes various tuning options and optimizations. Included topics are hyperthreading and Intel versus AMD.
• Chapter 8: Managing Memory for a Virtual Machine   Covers how memory is managed in a virtual environment and the configuration options available. It concludes with a discussion of various memory optimization technologies that are available and how they work.
• Chapter 9: Managing Storage for a Virtual Machine   Examines how virtual machines access storage arrays and the different connection options they can utilize. Included are virtual machine storage options and storage optimization technologies such as deduplication.
• Chapter 10: Managing Networking for a Virtual Machine   Begins with a discussion of virtual networking and how virtual machines use virtual switches to communicate with each other and the outside world. It concludes with virtual network configuration options and optimization practices.
• Chapter 11: Copying a Virtual Machine   Discusses how virtual machines are backed up and provisioned through techniques such as cloning and using templates. It finishes with a powerful feature called snapshots that can preserve a virtual machine state.
• Chapter 12: Managing Additional Devices in Virtual Machines   Begins by discussing virtual machine tools, vendor-provided application packages that optimize a virtual machine's performance, and concludes with individual discussions of virtual support for other peripheral devices like CD/DVD drives and USB devices.
• Chapter 13: Understanding Availability   Positions the importance of availability in the virtual environment and then discusses various availability technologies that protect individual virtual machines, virtualization servers, and entire data centers from planned and unplanned downtime.
• Chapter 14: Understanding Applications in a Virtual Machine   Focuses on the methodology and practices for deploying applications in a virtual...