Virtualization For Dummies®

Introduction

If you work in tech, there's no way you haven't heard the term virtualization. Even if you don't work in tech, you might have been exposed to virtualization. In August 2007, virtualization's leading company, VMware, went public with the year's most highly anticipated IPO. Even people who confuse virtualization with visualization sit up and pay attention when a blockbuster IPO comes to market. To show how hot the sector is, VMware was bought by the storage company EMC for $625 million in 2004, but it has, as of this writing, a market capitalization of $25.6 billion.

The excitement and big dollars illustrate a fundamental reality about virtualization: It's transforming the way computing works. Virtualization is going to fundamentally change the way you implement and manage data centers, the way you obtain and install software, and the way you think about the speed with which you can respond to changing business conditions. The changes that virtualization will cause in your work environment will be so profound that, in ten years time, you'll look back on the traditional ways of managing hardware and software the way your grandparents looked back on operator‐assisted telephone dialing after the introduction of direct dialing.

I wrote this book because I'm convinced that the world is on the cusp of an enormous change in the use of information technology, also known as IT. In the past, IT was expensive, so it was limited to must‐have applications such as accounting and order ...