Everything you wanted to know about virtualization but were afraid to ask. 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.

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.

A must-buy comprehensive introduction. This book assumes you know nothing about Virtualization and quickly reviews some of the buzzwords that frequently get thrown around (hypervisor, bare metal, ...). It provides a detailed introduction to key topics including Server Virtualization, Software Options, and managing a Virtualization Project. For business analysts, there is an informative chapter on cost-benefit analysis and several chapters on best practices and pitfalls.

With energy costs becoming a major factor in IT budgets, Virtualization will become even more widespread in the future. This is the best introductory book for practitioners and delivers a great overview of the complex world of virtualization, it provides a broad and comprehensive view of the complex world of virtualization, covering a large amount of territory. All of the major virtualization technologies are discussed, along with the various drivers for implementing virtualization, and how to manage migrating to a virtualized computing environment.

What makes this book stand out from most other resources on the topic is its tone. You're helpfully guided through the issues and tradeoffs in making a number of decisions on the what, where, when and how of virtualization. This is extremely helpful for an IT manager who needs to come up to speed in a short period of time.

This book is a Well-written technical overview with a great business focus, it is written in a conversational style that contains very clear, succinct conceptual information and technical details interspersed with very pertinent and well-focused stories. The writing style and very well organized structural approach to the topics makes this book very readable by technology analysts, CIOs, and technical project managers who need to be able see the big picture of the "forest through the trees" in order to understand the total corporate ROI issues with virtualization technology.

Conversely, the book is well suited to industry technologist and software engineers who want to obtain a quick basic working knowledge of the "detailed roots" of the virtualization technology but otherwise would never have been exposed to the broader applicability and global consequences of this very fundamental nuts-and-bolts software.

The well-organized structure of the book as independent parts, each containing independent chapters, makes it possible to pick and chose what information or level of technical detail is of interest to the reader while still allowing for interrelated topics to be introduced in the proper logically dependent sequence. Chapters such as "Common Terminology", "Companies Using Virtualization", "Why Virtualized Technology?", "Benefits of Virtualization", "Virtualization Technologies", "Comparison between Technologies", "Accomplishing Virtualization" and "Managing a Virtualized Environment" are precisely what CIOs, IT managers, and technologists need to know.