Virtualization for Dummies

Bernard Golden, THE source for open source, has done it again. A treasure of knowledge and wisdom all incorporated in one fabulous book. Whether you are a novice, a technology expert, or at the highest level of your organization, I highly recommend you pick up this book and read it. You will gain tremendous knowledge of how to successfully apply the concept of "Virtualization" to your organization. Chad Barr President CB Software Systems, Inc.

OK, I've been in this business too long: The first time I hear a new, impressive-sounding IT buzzword, I flinch. Part of my problem is that I've seen way too many stale old ideas rebranded by slapping fancy labels on them, an effect that often seems to happen about every four years. My suspicion is that four years is the optimal time for suckering a new generation of buyers fresh out of college into thinking they are getting something new. I still recall diving into a supposedly semi-autonomous "agent-based application" and discovering that its "agents" were actually nothing more than calls to ordinary functions. I've also seen too many cases where a single-vendor idea that succeeds in a narrow market niche gets generalized into a "trend" that then is applied blindly whether it works or not. Gartner has labeled this kind of overgeneralization the "Hype Cycle," for good reason. When good ideas are generalized by those who do not understand their original context, they seldom work well, and in the worst cases they can turn into truly spectacular IT disasters. Thus it when I first heard the term "virtualization" some time ago... I flinched. My thoughts went something like this: "Yeah, right. Sounds to me like someone borrowed an impressive computer science word to help sell a product that will end up sitting on a shelf in the IT room. And by the way, isn't 'virtual' pretty much a synonym for insanely slow? The kind of stuff that they show in demos in university labs, but which in the real world would bring even the largest data center down to its knees?" So what, one might well ask, was this curmudgeon's reaction when I picked up a copy of Bernard Golden's book, "Virtualization for Dummies"? Somewhat to my own surprise, it was favorable. I found the book to be both solid in approach and highly relevant to the situation in which many service providers, large and small, find themselves these days. However, if someone asked me to pick a title that I thought more accurately describes the contents and purpose of this book, I would have suggested something like this: "How to Stay Profitable While Your Service Market Goes Nuts" or perhaps if focusing on LAN admins: "How to Stay Employed While Users and Budgets Are Both Exploding" That is, this entire book is a practical, step-by-step instruction manual on how to get the most out of your installed hardware, even as the assumptions that guided the original procurement of that hardware seem to be flying out the window. You can call that virtualization, I guess, but in my mind "preserving one's own hide" would seem a bit closer to the mark. The term "virtualization," in case you are as baffled by it as I once was, is computer-speak for using clever software (and often hardware) to make more effective use of your existing servers. The implication is that previously dedicated servers become "virtual" servers for entirely new sets of applications and users. Those other users typically will be t

This book would be more appropriately titled "The Encyclopedia of Virtualization." It covers just about every aspect of Virtualization someone in IT would be concerned about, from high-level overviews of the different technologies that might be appropriate for upper management, to a very nice series of "hands on" chapters that walk you through experimenting with several of the free virtualization options, to a chapter on calculating the financial benefits of virtualization that CFO-types should love. This book was eminently readable in a sequential manner, and also very well indexed, with a detailed table of contents that made it easy to find a topic of interest. I've been perennially confused by how several of the new storage technologies relate to virtualization, and this book promptly set me straight. Whether you need a quick primer on virtualization so you can talk shop with those with more detailed knowledge, or want to get a sense of the benefits of the different technologies and how they fit into the "big picture" of the data center, this book is an invaluable resource. It gives you the vocabulary and understanding of how all the pieces fit together than websites and technical manuals often miss.

I first came across Bernard Golden in his CIO magazine articles and then his timely book about his Open Source Maturity Model (q.v.). He has good ideas that address issues we face every day, written in a way that the wisdom from his considerable experience comes through in a readable way. This book on virtualization, also incredibly timely, given VMWare's IPO and Microsoft's strengthening presence, is great for giving a third-party analysis that's impartial and not tainted by any developer's wares. I like the way it's written, with a conversational style. And I think it would be useful also for business types who need to understand the ramifications of all of this, as well as CIOs who need to persuade the Board of why it is worth their time. There's good discussion of where cost savings can come from; we could all use those these days. One particularly useful bit is where he discusses what some people think today: why spend money on something that's free (well, it's not really free once you get under the hype, and you can gain massive value advantages from spending some money). There's a lot of thought about future-proofing your solution and how the technology is going to develop, so the book is likely to remain useful for some time to come. For $29.99 you can't go wrong; you'd be lucky to get 5 minutes with a consultant for that (OK, maybe 3)! I am sure that even one idea from this book would easily repay the price. Can't recommend it highly enough. Good stuff.