If you want to gain insight into the real-world uses of VMware ESX and ESXi, this book provides scores of step-by-step solutions for working with these products in a wide range of network environments. You'll not only learn the basics -- how to pool resources from hardware servers, computer clusters, networks, and storage, and then distribute them among virtual machines -- but also the stumbling blocks you'll encounter when you monitor systems, troubleshoot problems, and deal with security.
In addition to the recipes, VMware Cookbook includes background information to help you determine your virtualization needs. You'll come to view VMware as part of the real environment, alongside operating systems, storage, and logical and physical network components.
- Follow best practices for installing VMware in your environment
- Discover how to secure and monitor your network
- Understand disk storage implementation and configuration
- Learn resource management using the distributed resource scheduler, shares, and resource pools
- Configure logical and physical networks
- Learn how to clone and migrate servers
- Gain valuable tips for configuration and fine-tuning
Many resources can teach you about virtualization and the basics of VMware. This book is for system administrators who are ready to go beyond an introduction.
Ryan Troy has over 12 years of Unix/Linux system administration experience, working in diverse industries that range from web hosting to the newspaper industry. He has written articles for Linux Identity magazine and co-authored articles for Linux+ magazine. He is passionate about virtualization, specifically VMware's technologies. Ryan also founded the now-official Ubuntu Linux forums (ubuntuforums.org) in October 2004; he currently serves as technical administrator and chairman of the Ubuntu Forum Council.
One of Ryan's latest projects has been to architect and build a virtualization infrastructure for a large newspaper chain in Michigan using VMware's ESX product line along with Dell Equallogic Storage Arrays.
Ryan is also a VMware Certified Professional.
Matthew Helmke has been a technical person since he got his first computer in 1981, a TRS-80 Color Computer--the original with the silver case. He first used Unix in 1987 while studying Lisp on a Vax at the university and when Linux came around, Matthew was thrilled. He has a bachelor's degree in education, a master's in information resources and library science, and currently works as a senior technical writer for Pearson Education writing documentation for educational assessment software.
Matthew is also a musician who plays the guitar and the bass and he has played as a studio musician for other artists. He is an avid and voracious reader, speaks several languages, has worked as an information consultant on topics including culture, language, religion, and computers, and spent several years running a small business in North Africa.
