VMWare vSphere 4 Administration

For those of us who have been working in the virtualization industry since its earliest days, it’s hard to imagine what datacenters were like without virtualization. Still there are many organizations that have yet to adopt virtualization within their datacenter. With the release of VMware vSphere 4, VMware’s flagship enterprise-class virtualization solution, VMware aims to change that reality. However, even though virtualization has many benefits—not the least of which include reducing your hardware footprint, enabling faster server provisioning, and simplifying disaster recovery—some people feel that virtualization also has a steep learning curve. IT professionals who want to become more familiar with virtualization need to learn about terms like VMotion, Storage VMotion, VMware Fault Tolerance, and VMkernel interfaces. All these new terms and new technologies can seem confusing to someone not familiar with how all the pieces fit together. In addition, virtualization sometimes forces IT professionals to think differently about how to solve old challenges. The “traditional” way of doing things often isn’t the best way of handling something after you’ve virtualized your datacenter.