Matthew Portnoy - Virtualization Essentials

Contents

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Copyright 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-17671-9

ISBN: 978-1-118-22698-8 (ebk.)

ISBN: 978-1-118-24017-5 (ebk.)

ISBN: 978-1-118-26480-5 (ebk.)

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Acknowledgments

A project is rarely a solo affair, and this one depended on a large crew for it to arrive. I need to thank Scott Lowe for shoveling the path and aiming me at the correct door. My deepest gratitude goes to Mark Milow for helping me climb aboard this rocket, to Mike Szfranski for your always open book of knowledge, to Nick Gamache for the insights, and to Tony Damiano for keeping our vehicle in the fast lane.

My heartfelt thanks also go to the virtual team at Sybex: Pete Gaughan, David Johnson, Van Van Noy, Christine OConnor, Kathy Grider-Carlyle, and Mariann Barsolo for their steadfast support, forcing me to improve with each chapter and keeping it all neat and clean. Special thanks go to Agatha Kim for getting this whole adventure rolling.

I need to thank my family beginning with my parents, teachers both, who instilled me with a love of reading and writing and set me on a path that somehow led here. Thank you to my boys, Lucas and Noah, who fill our days with laughter and music. And finally, a huge hug to my wife, Elizabeth, who encouraged me even when she had no idea what I was writing about. I love you.

About the Author

Matt Portnoy has been an information technology professional for more than 30 years, working in organizations such as NCR, Sperry/Unisys, Stratus Computer, Oracle, and currently VMware. He has been in the center of many of the core technological trends during this period, including the birth of the PC, client-server computing, fault tolerance and availability, the rise of the Internet, and now virtualization, which is the foundation for cloud computing. As both a presales and post-sales analyst, he has worked with all of the disciplines computing offers, including innumerable programming languages, operating systems, application design and development, database operations, networking, security, availability, and virtualization. He has spoken at the industrys largest virtualization conference, VMworld, and is a frequent speaker at user group meetings. He also has been teaching database classes as an adjunct professor at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2007.

Introduction

We live in an exciting time. The information age is exploding around us, giving us access to dizzying amounts of information at the instant it is available. Smart phones and tablets provide an untethered experience 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 print directions to get there, or Tweet their reactions once they have sampled the fare. The infrastructure supporting these services is also growing exponentially, and the technology that facilitates this rapid growth is virtualization.