Product Description

Virtualization has become a “megatrend”—and for good reason. Implementing virtualization allows for more efficient utilization of network server capacity, simpler storage administration, reduced energy costs, and better use of corporate capital. In other words: virtualization helps you save money, energy, and space. Not bad, huh?

If you’re thinking about “going virtual” but have the feeling everyone else in the world understands exactly what that means while you’re still virtually in the dark, take heart. Virtualization for Dummies gives you a thorough introduction to this hot topic and helps you evaluate if making the switch to a virtual environment is right for you.

This fun and friendly guide starts with a detailed overview of exactly what virtualization is and exactly how it works, and then takes you on a tour of the benefits of a virtualized environment, such as added space in overcrowded data centers, lower operations costs through more efficient infrastructure administration, and reduced energy costs through server consolidation.

Next, you’ll get step-by-step guidance on how to:

• Perform a server virtualization cost versus benefit analysis
• Weigh server virtualization options
• Choose hardware for your server virtualization project
• Create a virtualized software environment
• Migrate to—and manage—your new virtualized environment

Whether you’re an IT manager looking to sell the idea to your boss, or just want to learn more about how to create, migrate to, and successfully manage a virtualized environment, Virtualization for Dummies is your go-to guide for virtually everything you need to know.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109463 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 362 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470148310
• Condition: USED - LIKE NEW
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Bernard Golden has been called “a renowned open source expert” (IT Business Edge) and “an open source guru” (SearchCRM.com) and is regularly featured in magazines like Computerworld, InformationWeek, and Inc. His blog “The Open Source” is one of the most popular features of CIO Magazine’s Web site. Bernard is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like LinuxWorld, the Open Source Business Conference, and the Red Hat Summit. He is the author of Succeeding with Open Source, (Addison-Wesley, 2005, published in four languages), which is used in over a dozen university open source programs throughout the world. Bernard is the CEO of Navica, a Silicon Valley IT management consulting firm.

Customer Reviews

Great Primer for Beginners
"Virtualization for Dummies" is intended to provide the non-technical or para-technical reader (e.g. technology procurement analysts, technical writers, project managers) with a thorough but still high-level understanding of virtualization technology. The initial chapters describe the `nuts and bolts' of the technology itself including it's benefits and limitations, the main products in the field, and how it actually performs its magic. While parts of this can get a little technical, the author does an admirable job of demystifying the basic concepts and practices of Virtualization.

The remainder of the book expands into a variety of sub-topics that include such things as hardware evaluation and selection, cost-benefits analysis, and implementing virtualization using various, industry-standard products. Readers can choose the chapters and sub-chapters that best suit their needs and skim through the balance.
Bernard Goldman is clearly very experienced in both virtualization technology itself and general IT process management. Although he does get a little beyond the book's original objectives at times, this results in a good deal of insight about the reality of deploying a virtualized environment. Using anecdotal stories and frequent, humorous observations he's produced a highly readable and very instructive volume.

Two things that might improve its impact are some strategically placed diagrams to illustrate some of the more abstract concepts; and a short glossary explaining some of the technology terms that invariably creep into any computer publication. Otherwise this is a surprisingly capable primer and I give it a solid 4 stars for its content, organization, and readability.

A skeptic's look at Virtualization (and this book about it)
OK, I've been in this business too long: The first time I hear a new, impressive-sounding IT buzzword, I flinch.

Part of my problem is that I've seen way too many stale old ideas rebranded by slapping fancy labels on them, an effect that often seems to happen about every four years. My suspicion is that four years is the optimal time for suckering a new generation of buyers fresh out of college into thinking they are getting something new. I still recall diving into a supposedly semi-autonomous "agent-based application" and discovering that its "agents" were actually nothing more than calls to ordinary functions.

I've also seen too many cases where a single-vendor idea that succeeds in a narrow market niche gets generalized into a "trend" that then is applied blindly whether it works or not. Gartner has labeled this kind of overgeneralization the "Hype Cycle," for good reason. When good ideas are generalized by those who do not understand their original context, they seldom work well, and in the worst cases they can turn into truly spectacular IT disasters.

Thus it when I first heard the term "virtualization" some time ago... I flinched. My thoughts went something like this:

"Yeah, right. Sounds to me like someone borrowed an impressive computer science word to help sell a product that will end up sitting on a shelf in the IT room. And by the way, isn't 'virtual' pretty much a synonym for insanely slow? The kind of stuff that they show in demos in university labs, but which in the real world would bring even the largest data center down to its knees?"


So what, one might well ask, was this curmudgeon's reaction when I picked up a copy of Bernard Golden's book, "Virtualization for Dummies"?

Somewhat to my own surprise, it was favorable. I found the book to be both solid in approach and highly relevant to the situation in which many service providers, large and small, find themselves these days. However, if someone asked me to pick a title that I thought more accurately describes the contents and purpose of this book, I would have suggested something like this:

"How to Stay Profitable While Your Service Market Goes Nuts"

or perhaps if focusing on LAN admins:

"How to Stay Employed While Users and Budgets Are Both Exploding"

That is, this entire book is a practical, step-by-step instruction manual on how to get the most out of your installed hardware, even as the assumptions that guided the original procurement of that hardware seem to be flying out the window. You can call that virtualization, I guess, but in my mind "preserving one's own hide" would seem a bit closer to the mark.

The term "virtualization," in case you are as baffled by it as I once was, is computer-speak for using clever software (and often hardware) to make more effective use of your existing servers. The implication is that previously dedicated servers become "virtual" servers for entirely new sets of applications and users.

Those other users typically will be the cranky ones whose most beloved application has become slow and unreliable as of late. By using virtualization, you may even convince them that you forked over money for a new server, when all you really did was "virtualize" an old one that had been badly underutilized.

What's really nice about "Virtualization for Dummies" is that Golden works hard not to play "magic wand" with this technique. He emphasizes that it requires hard work, a lot of planning, and careful selection of options. He also points out that it doesn't apply in every case, and that if you don't stick to it, you may end up right back in the same sticky spot from which you started.

Golden provides a detailed, easily understood checklist approach for determining virtualization is even relevant for you, a question that too many advocates of this or that technology often seem to neglect entirely. He also runs the reader through the many different types of virtualization and how their benefits differ, again with a focus on helping the reader understand what is mostly likely to be suitable for a specific situation. The reader comes aways at the same time with a better feel for which approaches might actually make a situation worse instead of better.

What I like most about Golden's book, though, is that if you take it seriously, it begins to change your entire outlook on how to provide services. You can look at the klutzy mix of hardware and locked-in applications there now, and begin to see the potential over time for something very, very different: a suite of hardware that is remarkably uniform, yet still capable of addressing the unique needs of all users. Those users may even experience the unique feeling that for a short time the entire capacity of your server bays has been focused onto their unique needs. And it may even be true!

This is a future that makes a lot of sense, and Golden's detailed discussions of software and hardware already in use makes you realize that it is a future that is most definitely obtainable.

For the nearer term, Golden helps readers identify cases where specific virtualization techniques could make a difference quickly. He describes a range of specific tools, and describes how they fit into the overall virtualization problem. Some of these tools are powerful, cheap, and even free. In the right situations they can enable significant virtualization without requiring any new acquisitions. That potential alone makes virtualization a topic worth exploring, and Golden's book provides an excellent, practical path for understanding this topic.

So, my bottom line: I recommend this book highly for anyone who is frustrated by having to deal with hard-to-control, highly heterogeneous server environments, and who wants a better approach. Golden provides that approach, and he does so in a way that is readable, practical, and above all, doable.

Well-written CIO technical overview with a great business focus !!!
A great book!!! As an industry consultant and Technical Advisor to several companies struggling with their expanding requirements for fault tolerant infrastructure, I found this book to be the most useful so far for IT technologists and decision makers who need to get their arms around the ramifications of all of this. I was familiar with Bernard Golden's CIO magazine articles and insightful book "Succeeding with Open Source" and was pleased to discover he had also written a book covering the fast moving and diverse topic of Virtualization. It is written in a conversational style that contains very clear, succinct conceptual information and technical details interspersed with very pertinent and well-focused stories. The writing style and very well organized structural approach to the topics makes this book very readable by technology analysts, CIOs, and technical project managers who need to be able see the big picture of the "forest through the trees" in order to understand the total corporate ROI issues with virtualization technology. Conversely, the book is well suited to industry technologist and software engineers who want to obtain a quick basic working knowledge of the "detailed roots" of the virtualization technology but otherwise would never have been exposed to the broader applicability and global consequences of this very fundamental nuts-and-bolts software.

The well-organized structure of the book as independent parts, each containing independent chapters, makes it possible to pick and chose what information or level of technical detail is of interest to the reader while still allowing for interrelated topics to be introduced in the proper logically dependent sequence. Chapters such as "Performing a Server Virtualization Cost-Benefit Analysis", "Managing a Virtual Project", "Migrating to Your New Virtualized Environment", "Managing Your Virtualized Environment", and "Creating a Virtualized Storage Environment" are precisely what CIOs, IT managers, and technologists need to know!

The chapters on implementing Vmware Server, Fedora Virtualization, and Xen servers are precisely the basic bare-bones installation overview information IT engineers need to know so they can quickly deploy Virtualization evaluation/prototyping environments and start getting their fingernails dirty. Of course they will probably want/need to augment this general installation information with more specific details of each corresponding VM environment once they have it up and running.

The only improvement I would suggest is additional information on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2). Though there are at least two full and very insightful pages dedicated to this topic highlighting its benefits and current shortcomings, EC2 is evolving so fast it may merit its own sub-chapter. Perhaps in the next edition of this book!