Although a handful of products have emerged for enterprise-level virtualization, this book provides all of the details an IT professional needs to design, deploy, manage, and monitor an environment built on the leading virtualization product, VMware Infrastructure 3.

This book is written with a start-to-finish approach to installing, configuring, managing, and monitoring a virtual environment using the VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) product suite. The book begins by introducing the VI3 product suite and all of its great features. After introducing all of the bells and whistles, this book details an installation of the product and then moves into configuration. Upon completion of the installation and configuration, we move into virtual machine creation and management, and then into monitoring and troubleshooting. This book can be read from cover to cover to gain an understanding of the VI3 product in preparation for a new virtual environment. Or it can also be used as a reference for IT professionals who have begun their virtualization and want to complement their skills with real-world tips, tricks, and best practices as found in each chapter.

This book, geared toward the aspiring and the practicing virtualization professional, provides information to help implement, manage, maintain, and troubleshoot an enterprise virtualization scenario. As an added benefit we have included four appendices: one offering solutions to Master It problems, another detailing common Linux and ESX commands, another discussing some of the more popular tools and third-party products that can be used to facilitate virtual infrastructure management, and another describing best practices for VI3.