Konstantin Kuminsky - VMWare vCenter Cookbook

Virtualization is becoming a central component of data center strategies and as a result, it is an increasingly important aspect of the information technology strategy of many organizations. Organizations across many different sectors and of varying sizes are working to deploy more sophisticated computing infrastructures that use virtualization in order to maximize resource utilization. Virtualization provides organizations with a number of advantages, including better efficiency, better resource utilization, an improved ability to scale solutions and services while often achieving cost savings, and significant return on investment.

However, supporting a highly virtualized computing infrastructure can be challenging for many organizations. Managing and deploying many virtual machines can be a challenge, and managing the many different configurations can be overwhelming, especially for heterogeneous computing environments comprised of different kinds of servers with different processors, cores, memory, and so on. For enterprises making use of virtualized environments to serve core enterprise applications and house critical data, ensuring availability and reliability in a virtualized environment can be daunting.

As the leading virtualization company, VMware too has recognized the challenges in managing complex, enterprise datacenters and computing environments. To address these challenges and associated complexities, it introduced vCenter and vSphere to help administrators manage complex virtualized environments. Like many commercial software products, vCenter and vSphere are really a suite of software components that come in a number of different versions. While they make life easier for the administrator, they too are complex software products.

As in many situations, learning to use a complex software suite often requires assistance and sometimes, it is best done through examples. This book plays an important role in helping to fill an administrator's understanding and use of vCenter and vSphere. This book assumes that the reader/user will have access to vCenter that is deployed and has hosts and datastores. This book notes that this could be a trial license, which should be sufficient to allow the reader to explore vCenter and vSphere. For those in the process of acquiring vCenter, this is a useful suggestion as it will help determine versions of vSphere that may be needed.