VMware Cookbook : A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

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 (http://www.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 written articles for magazines such as Linux+ and Linux Identity, helped write Prentice Hall's The Official Ubuntu Book, and has written and self-published two books about Arabic and Moroccan culture. He first used Unix in 1987 while studying Lisp on a Vax at the university. Currently, he is an active member of the Ubuntu Linux community as an Administrator and Forum Council member for the Ubuntu Forums (ubuntuforums.org), and a member of the membership approval committee for Ubuntu in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He has run a business using only free software, has done some consulting, and is currently working on a master's degree in Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona.