Ryan Troy - VMware Cookbook

VMware is one of those products that many of us, including this books authors, have been reading about for years. Ryan had the opportunity to become involved with and architect a virtualized environment a few years ago. After researching several options, he became particularly interested in and impressed by VMwares enterprise virtualization platform. As time passed and he worked directly with VMwares products in a production environment, he became even more enthused.

Matthew and Ryan have worked together on several projects in the past. In the summer of 2008, the two of us decided we would like to write a book together. We tossed around ideas and decided to write on VMwares ESX platform, because it impressed us so. Since Matthew was already an established writer and also technologically proficient, although new to this specific software, we decided that Ryan would do the technical writing and Matthew would concentrate his efforts on making sure it all came across clearly and accurately. As we mention later in the Acknowledgments, Dell was kind enough to lend us some equipment for testing while writing, and the two of us got together and began experimenting.

We are genuinely delighted by VMware as a company, and have found its employees very kind and helpful. We have also become sold on its products. Using VMwares platform in a production environment has been everything it is advertised to be: it has made system administration easier, made the use of resources more efficient and cost-effective, and quite frankly been a lot of fun. If this werent the case, like all true geeks (in the best sense of the word), we would find something else to play with. So far, we havent.

This book encompasses many of the most useful and interesting recipes we have discovered while using the platform in production, as well as some cool tricks we encountered while testing and playing. We believe that anyone whos using the VMware platform will find this book useful, and we hope it helps you enjoy VMware as much as we do.