Virtualizing microsoft tier 1 applications with vmware vsphere 4 pdf

This book would not have been possible without the endless love and support of my family and friends. I would like to thank my parents and parents-in-law for all their love and support. I want to thank my wife, Mrudula, for making sure things were as smooth as usual throughout the writing process and taking care of our daughters, Mitali and Namita. Thanks to Shandar Varadarajan, our technical editor, for his detailed reviews and for not only making sure we covered the right topics but also ensuring that the content is technically accurate.

Finally, a big thank-you to the entire Sybex team: Agatha Kim, our acquisitions editor, for giving us the opportunity to write this book and accommodating our busy schedules; Tom Cirtin, our developmental editor, for his encouraging words, keeping me on track, and providing excellent feedback at all times; Rachel McConlogue, our production editor; Kim Wimpsett, our copyeditor; and Pete Gaughan and Neil Edde.

Thank you to our technical editors Shandar Varadarajan and Deji Akomolafe; their vast knowledge helped to ensure we delivered the most technically correct content possible. Agatha, Tom, and the entire Sybex team—you guys are awesome. Thank you for keeping us on track and getting this book out the door. Finally, I would like to give very big thanks for those that have had to put up with the crazy work hours before, during, and beyond this project.

Laura, Joe, Sissy, I love you guys, and knowing I get to come home to you all is what gets me through the long hours. Windom, Sr. He and others on the VMware team are responsible for the testing and qualification of the bit Microsoft Clustering and database availability group support on the VMware Infrastructure v3.

In his spare time, Charles enjoys spending time with his family, listening to and playing music, and tinkering in his vSphere lab and with the latest technological gadgets. Hemant Gaidhani has more than 18 years of experience in software development, performance engineering, quality assurance, and technology marketing.

Before that, Hemant specialized in vSphere performance, scalability, and best practices for enterprise applications running in VMware virtualization environments. He has authored numerous publications and has been a regular speaker at industry conferences such as VMworld and EMC World. In his spare time, Hemant enjoys listening to music and spending time with his family.

Alex Fontana is an infrastructure architect at VMware, specializing in Microsoft applications. Alex has worked in the technology industry for more than 10 years and has spent the last 5 years focused on virtualizing Microsoft applications using VMware virtualization products.

In his spare time Alex enjoys snowboarding, running, biking, and playing golf. Look for Alex presenting at future Microsoft technology conferences and the number-one virtualization event, VMworld.

Contents at a Glance Introduction. Virtualization Technologies. Hosted Virtualization. Bare-Metal Virtualization. Planning Virtual Deployment. Understanding Operational Requirements. Licensing Considerations. Migrating to a Virtual Environment. Initial Creation of Virtual Machines. Ongoing Provisioning Strategy. Ensuring High Availability. Host Availability. Application-Aware Availability. Devising a Backup Strategy. Deploying VMware Update Manager.

Using VMware Update Manager. Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program. Deployment Strategies. Network Configuration. Active Directory Time Synchronization. Kerberos v5. Controlling Time Drift. Active Directory Backup and Recovery. Monitoring Active Directory Replication. What to Monitor. Active Directory Proof of Concept. Configure and Synchronize Time. Prevent Active Directory Deletions.

Monitor Active Directory Replication. Choosing a Flavor of Windows Server Installing IIS. IIS Performance. Monitoring Performance. Performance Tuning. Network Load Balancing. Securing Virtualized Internet Information Services.

Installing VMware AppSpeed. Exchange Server Comparisons. Exchange Server Exchange Server and Server Roles. Edge Server Role. Client Access Server Role. Hub Transport Role. Mailbox Server Role. Unified Messaging Server Role. Hardware Availability. Service Availability. Data Redundancy and Availability. Edge Transport. Client Access Server.

Hub Transport. Mailbox Server. Unified Messaging. Backup and Restore. VMware Exchange Building Blocks. Virtualizing Exchange Server Proof of Concept.

Building the Exchange Server Environment. Data Integrity in a Virtual Environment. Support Considerations. Security Considerations. Hardware Considerations. Storage Considerations.

High Availability Considerations. Backup Considerations. What Not to Virtualize. Defining Availability Requirements. Defining Backup Strategies and Requirements. Defining Patching and Update Strategies. Defining Capacity and System Growth Requirements. Defining Deployment Strategy. Migrate to Virtual Environment. Configuring vSphere. What Is SharePoint Governance? SharePoint Server Roles and Responsibilities. Considering Server Role Virtualization Workload.

Application Server Role. Index Server Role. Database Back-End Server Role. Sizing the Server Roles. Using the HP Sizing Tool. SharePoint Proof of Concept. Configuring Windows Network Load Balancing. RD Session Host Role. RD Licensing Role. RD Connection Broker Role. RD Gateway Role. RD Web Access Role. Characterizing Remote Desktop Services Environment. Checking Application Compatibility. Defining User Requirements.

Deployment Considerations. Configuring the Active Directory Virtual Machine. Configuring RemoteApp. Configuring the RD Gateway Role.

As the number of different applications being deployed in data centers grows, efficiency in deployment, management, and resource consumption is critical. Imagine having to deploy a new piece of physical hardware for each of these applications—or, even worse, each tier of these applications. Racking, stacking, and installing the OS took a day to complete. The procurement and approval processes alone took weeks. How did we ever get anything done?

Luckily for us, VMware has dramatically changed the landscape of IT with the vSphere suite of virtualization products. With the introduction of virtualization into the data center, businesses have sought to virtualize the infrastructure of their data centers by deploying hosted and bare-metal virtualization products.

As we strive to make our processes more efficient, virtualization just makes sense. Provisioning takes minutes, not days; management can be done through a single pane of glass, and hardware upgrades—rather, virtual-hardware upgrades—happen from home on the weekends. As server hardware becomes more powerful and applications become more efficient, though, it makes no sense to deploy a single application on a single piece of physical hardware, even the larger and more demanding applications.

These are usually the tier-1 applications that are considered critical for the business. However, early virtualization efforts for these tier-1 applications were not very successful for a variety of reasons.

Immaturity of the virtualization platforms as well as improper planning caused these projects to fail and created a negative opinion of virtualization in businesses. It is these enhancements and advances in virtualization platforms that have customers excited about virtualizing their advanced infrastructures and tier-1, business-critical applications.

That includes the server OS and application realm. According to IDC, Windows-based servers accounted for about 70 percent share of the x86 server revenue as well as server unit shipments in the year Look at the headers of any email message in your corporate email inbox, and chances are it will have originated on a Microsoft Exchange server.

What is at the head and tail ends of that SharePoint environment? What do all of these applications ride on top of?

That is the goal of this book—to help IT professionals gain the confidence and understanding to successfully deploy tier-1 Microsoft applications on vSphere. Who Should Read This Book Virtualization administrators responsible for designing and managing the server, storage and network infrastructure deployment for VMware vSphere, will benefit from this book. Understanding the virtualization-specific considerations for tier-1 Microsoft applications will enable them to design optimal architecture that meets necessary service-level agreements in place.

Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Server professionals will relate to the topics covered in this book. For the administrators who manage only a small portion of the Microsoft infrastructure or application stack, this is a good way to learn a little about the virtualized deployment of other tier-1 Microsoft applications.

This will undoubtedly add significant value to your career when your colleagues are asked to virtualize an application such as SharePoint and you are able to lend the knowledge obtained in this book. In general, IT managers and architects interested in virtualizing tier-1 applications in VMware vSphere environment should read this book. Although each of the major Microsoft tier-1 applications is covered in this book, these lessons are focused on virtualization and in no way can touch the level of detail that a dedicated book on the specific application can cover.

Our assumption is that you have thorough knowledge of the Microsoft server applications that you plan to deploy in a virtual environment. We will not discuss application-specific design and architecture in this book. Several books are dedicated to each server application on these topics; we suggest perusing the Sybex website. The objective of this book is to discuss specific considerations when it comes to virtualizing these applications using VMware vSphere.

As a result, you will also notice that we do not cover every detailed step when configuring these products in our proof-of-concept deployments. The authors have spent considerable time virtualizing these Microsoft Tier-1 applications using VMware vSphere 4.

What You Will Learn In this book we show you the basic considerations for virtualizing Microsoft tier-1 applications. You will learn how to deploy these applications in VMware vSphere environment and monitor them on an ongoing basis. We will also provide details on other VMware solutions that simplify other virtualization tasks, such as virtual machine provisioning, patching, and backup.

You will learn how to make your journey in the virtualization realm a much simpler one through the use of virtualization and the vSphere product feature set. This book is not designed to teach you how to deploy these applications, and the proof of concepts in each chapter show one way to deploy them. It should be understood that there are a countless number of ways to design and deploy these applications. With the proof of concepts, we try to give you a simple business case for designing and deploying the application.

You should always evaluate your business and technical requirements for performance, operation, business continuity, and disaster recovery if required.

This book shows you the vSphere products that are available for use in each of the aforementioned areas for design and deployment of these applications on the vSphere virtualization platform. What You Need Trying to describe virtualization is not an easy task.

Trying to describe how to execute specific tasks in a virtualized environment without visual aids is near impossible. To gain the most out of this book, you will want to follow along and use the proof of concepts as guides to setting up and configuring your own virtualized Microsoft environment.

VMware offers ESXi as a free download. The latter two will give you a month or so of free use on which you can build Virtual Machines and get hands-on experience with what is discussed in this book. Aside from a virtualization platform on which to begin working, an understanding of the tier-1 Microsoft applications covered in this book will be helpful. Covering each application end-to-end is not the intent here; rather, we cover what to look out for when you toss vSphere into the mix.

As mentioned in the book, it is recommended that you not use the VMware Server and Workstation products for any deployments of these applications in a production environment. To take advantage of all the features covered in this book, the vSphere products we recommend include vSphere 4. It specifically points out features that are new in vSphere 4.

You will learn how to quickly deploy consistent virtual machine images using the templates and tools found in vSphere. It will address their frequently asked questions and provide a proof-of-concept methodology for SQL Server virtualization with VMware vSphere; it also covers the considerations for virtualizing SQL Server on the vSphere platform and how to characterize existing SQL Server deployments for virtualization.

We focus on the traditional session-based remote desktops provided by RDS in this chapter. Charles A. Charles also occasionally blogs on TechPitch as well as other VMware blog sites.

Questions for Charles can be directed to [email protected] Hemant Gaidhani authors his personal blog and virtualization-management blog on VMware Communities website. He also contributes to various VMware communities. Alex will also occasionally pop up on the ActiveDir.

Any questions for Alex can be directed to [email protected] Sybex strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check its website at www. A bare-metal hypervisor that enables full virtualization of industry-standard x86 hardware forms the foundation of this virtualization platform. In addition to this hypervisor, vSphere includes several advanced features that support innovative applications of virtualization technology.

These features range from resource pooling, dynamic balancing of workloads, high availability, and disaster recovery. In this chapter, we will describe these services and provide details of their features. We will specifically call out features that are new in vSphere 4.

Infrastructure Services vSphere infrastructure services are the core set of services that allows you to virtualize x86 servers see Figure 1.

First, these services abstract the physical x86 hardware resources, such as CPU, memory, storage, and network adapters, into virtual hardware to create virtual machines VMs. Next, these services enable vSphere to transform resources from individual x86 servers into a shared computing platform with several operating systems and applications running simultaneously in different virtual machines. Finally, the infrastructure services provide several sophisticated features to optimize resources in such a shared environment.

Figure 1. The vCompute services also aggregate these resources from several discrete servers into shared logical pools that can be allocated to applications running inside virtual machines. It supports different x86 virtualization technologies such as VMware-invented binary translation, hardware-assisted virtualization, and paravirtualization. VMware ESXi is a free version of ESX with a smaller footprint that minimizes the surface area for potential security attacks, making it more secure and reliable.

ESX also includes several advanced CPU scheduling capabilities, as well as unique memory management features such as transparent page sharing and memory ballooning. These sophisticated features enable ESX to achieve higher consolidation ratios compared to its competition. It aggregates CPU and memory resources across many physical servers into a shared cluster and then dynamically allocates these cluster resources to virtual machines based on a set of configurable options.

DRS makes sure that resource utilization is continuously balanced across different servers in the shared cluster. It continuously optimizes server power consumption within each cluster by powering on or off vSphere servers as needed.

VMware ESX and ESXi use bare-metal architecture; in other words, they install directly on the server hardware, without the need for a host operating system. Virtualization Architectures Virtualization products for x86 servers commonly use two types of architectures: a hosted architecture or a hypervisor architecture. The hosted, or type 2, virtualization products run on top of the Windows or Linux host operating system.

The host operating system controls the access to the physical resources, and virtual machines run as applications alongside other software on the host machine.

The VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Server products are examples of hosted virtualization architecture. Since they have direct access to the hardware resources rather than going through a host operating system, the hypervisor products are more efficient than hosted virtualization products, and deliver greater scalability, robustness, and performance.

The x86 processors were not designed with virtualization in mind. These processors have 17 CPU instructions that require special privileges and can result in operating system instability when virtualized. The binary translation technique translates these privileged instructions into equivalent safe instructions, thus enabling virtualization for x86 servers.

Binary translation does not require any specific features in the x86 processors and hence enables you to virtualize any x86 server in the data center without modifying guest operating system and applications running on it. Hardware-assisted virtualization relies on the CPU instruction set and memory management virtualization features that both AMD and Intel have recently introduced in the x86 processors. This alone did not perform fast enough for all different workloads, compared to the binary translation technology.

Virtualization using these second-generation hardware-assisted processors usually performs better than binary translation. Consequently, with the release of vSphere, VMware ESX, and ESXi now default to hardwareassisted virtualization out of the box, but you do have the choice to override this setting. Because the VMI standard is supported out of the box in newer Linux kernels, there is no need to maintain separate distributions of Linux specifically for virtualization.

Hardware-Assisted Memory Virtualization Memory management in virtual machines is challenging compared to physical machines, especially when it comes to virtual memory address translation. However, the guest OS does not have access to the physical machine memory; ESX controls the access to the actual physical memory.

ESX performs the final translation to machine physical memory addresses by implementing a set of shadow page tables for each virtual machine. This overhead can be significant for virtual machines running several processes or using multiple virtual CPUs. Both AMD and Intel have introduced hardware-assisted memory management capabilities to alleviate this situation.

Processors supporting hardware-assisted memory management implement an additional level of page tables in hardware. Offloading this memory management to hardware has two benefits: hardware page table processing is faster than software implementation, and ESX can use the freed CPU cycles for more workload-related processing.

The performance benefits of hardware-assisted memory management are achievable only if page table entries are located in hardware page tables. Remember that the real estate on a processor chip is at a premium and hence limits the size of hardware page tables.

If a page table entry is not found in the hardware page tables, the associated translation lookaside buffer TLB miss can result in more expensive processing compared to software shadow page tables implemented by ESX.

You can reduce the number of TLB misses by using large memory pages. ESX has been supporting large memory pages since version 3. Together, hardware-assisted memory management and large memory pages will provide better performance. The CPU scheduler allows you to over-commit available physical CPU resources; in other words, the total number of virtual CPUs allocated across all virtual machines on a vSphere host can be more than the number of physical CPU cores available.

The virtual machines are scheduled on all available physical CPUs in a vSphere host by default or can be affinitized or pinned to specific physical CPUs. When scheduling virtual CPUs allocated to virtual machines, the CPU scheduler uses a proportional-share scheduling algorithm that also takes into account user-provided resource specifications such as shares, reservations, and limits.

Maintaining CPU resource allocation fairness among a number of virtual machines running on a vSphere host is a key aspect of ESX processor scheduling. Strict co-scheduling required that a virtual machine would run only if all its virtual CPUs could be scheduled to run together. With relaxed co-scheduling, ESX can schedule a subset of virtual machine CPUs as needed without causing any guest operating system instability. The ESX 4. These features make sure that in a highly consolidated environment virtual machines are allocated the required memory as needed without impacting the performance of other virtual machines.

For example, the total amount of memory allocated for all virtual machines running on a vSphere host can be more than the total physical memory available on the host. For example, multiple virtual machines running Windows Server will have many identical memory pages. ESX will store a single copy of these identical memory pages in memory and create additional copies only if a memory page changes. It puts artificial memory pressure on idle virtual machines, forcing them to use their own paging areas and release memory.

This allows active virtual machines in need of memory to use this memory. Keep in mind that ESX will ensure that a virtual machine memory usage cannot exceed its configured memory. Operating systems rely on the translation lookaside buffers inside the processor to translate virtual to physical memory addresses.

Larger page sizes mean that a TLB cache of the same size can keep track of larger amounts of memory, thus avoiding the costly TLB misses. Enterprise applications such as database servers and Java virtual machines commonly use large memory pages to increase TLB access efficiency and improve performance. ESX supports the use of large memory pages in virtual machines and backs up with its own large memory pages to maintain efficient memory access.

Resource Management VMware vSphere allows you to establish minimum, maximum, and proportional resource shares for CPU, memory, disk, and network bandwidth for virtual machines. The minimum resource setting or reservation guarantees the amount of CPU and memory resources for a virtual machine, while the maximum resource setting or limit caps the amount of CPU and memory resources a virtual machine can use.

The proportional resource allocation mechanism provides three levels—normal, low, and high—out of the box. These settings help configure virtual machine priority for CPU and memory resources relative to each other. These can be set at the resource pool level and are inherited or overridden at the individual virtual machine level. You can leverage these resource allocation policies to improve service levels for your software applications.

The key advantage of these settings is that you can change resource allocations while virtual machines are running, and the changes will take place immediately without any need to reboot.

If too much CPU and memory resources are reserved, you may not be able to start virtual machines. Later chapters in this book cover setting up a Microsoft Cluster Service configuration using Windows Server and will demonstrate the use of this device.

You can hot add and remove virtual CPUs, hot add and remove network cards and disks, and hot add memory to a virtual machine when using virtual hardware version 7. The support for the CPU and memory hot-add plug-in depends upon the guest operating system support. New virtual machines created in the vSphere environment use virtual hardware version 7 by default. You can find the virtual hardware version either on the virtual machine Summary tab or at the top left of the Virtual Machine Properties window.

To convert your existing virtual machines, you first need to update VMware Tools to the latest version. You can then upgrade the virtual hardware used by the virtual machine. Right-click the virtual machine, and the context menu should provide you with an option to perform this upgrade Figure 1.

The virtual machine upgrade process is irreversible, and you will see a warning window during the upgrade steps, as shown here. You can then organize these resource pools to create a flexible hierarchy to reflect business priorities.

DRS also allows you to extend the resource management capabilities of a single ESX server such as shares, reservations, or limits to all virtual machines within these resource pools Figure 1. For example, you can assign higher shares of the total resources to the production resource pool compared to a test and development resource pool.

Likewise, you can guarantee fixed CPU and memory reservations for businesscritical applications within that production resource pool. For example, you can define an affinity rule to make sure that all virtual machines in a given application stack always run on the same server. All network communication for such co-located virtual machines takes place in memory and can benefit application performance. You can use this to avoid a single point of failure and increase availability for application components such as web servers in a load-balanced farm.

It continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and then generates recommendations to optimally place virtual machines within these resource pools. While doing this, DRS also takes into account any priority settings, such as shares, reservations, and limits, as well as resource allocation rules and policies you may have defined.

You can configure to execute these virtual machine placement recommendations automatically or manually Figure 1. Alternatively, you can configure DRS to use manual mode so it only makes recommendations that you can then choose to act on. By leveraging VMotion, VMware DRS also simplifies planned maintenance on physical servers without disrupting virtual machines and end users.

When you place a physical server in maintenance mode, VMware DRS identifies alternative servers where the virtual machines can run.

Based on the automation mode settings, either the virtual machines are automatically moved to use the alternative servers or the system administrator performs the move manually using the VMware DRS recommendations as a guideline.

When resource utilization in a DRS cluster goes down, DPM consolidates virtual machines within the cluster on fewer ESX servers and powers off unused servers to conserve energy. When resource requirements increase, DPM brings ESX servers back online to ensure that virtual machines get appropriate resources and service levels can be maintained Figure 1.

CPU power management technologies. These technologies leverage dynamic voltage and frequency scaling DVFS to reduce power consumption. Thin provisioning initially allocates only as much storage capacity as needed and grows as more data is stored in the virtual disk.

This increases storage utilization allowing you to defer storage purchases until they are really required. In the next sections, we will discuss each of these vStorage services in detail. VMFS is optimized to support large files associated with virtual disks, thus enabling encapsulation of an entire virtual machine in a set of files.

Using VMFS, you can place these virtual machine files on a shared storage and allow multiple ESX servers to concurrently read and write to this shared storage. VMFS uses on-disk file locking to ensure that the same virtual machine is not powered on by multiple servers at the same time. VMFS hides the complexities of underlying storage systems and, irrespective of the storage type, simplifies storage management using automatic discovery and mapping of LUNs to a VMFS volume.

It complements the dynamic LUN expansion capability that exists in many storage array offerings today. You will need to run guest operating system tools for it to start using the additional storage. Together with the VMFS Volume Grow capability, this feature provides a very flexible and dynamic way to manage storage capacity growth. It allows the storage administrator to configure more virtual machine storage capacity than the actual physical storage currently available.

This is possible because thin provisioning enables virtual machines to utilize storage space on an as-needed basis. When a virtual disk is initially allocated, it is assigned 1 MB of storage space in the data store. As that disk space is used up, additional 1 MB chunks of storage are allocated for the virtual disk so that the underlying storage demand will grow as its size increases.

This dynamic allocation reduces storage over-provisioning and increases storage utilization, allowing you to defer storage purchases until they are really required. Windom, Hemant Gaidhani, Alex Fontana. With authors who are not only insiders at VMware but who also have developed best practices for multi-tier applications for VMware environments,.

The start-to-finish guide to virtualizing business-critical SQL Server databases on VMware vSphere 5 By virtualizing business-critical databases, enterprises can drive far more value from existing IT infrastructure.

But squeezing maximum performance out of a virtualized database instance is an art as much as a science. Throughout, the authors share valuable tips, tricks, and insights from their own experiences. For each Microsoft application, they provide "proof of concept" sample configurations and clearly explain how new features impact virtualization. You'll also find authoritative, up-to-date guidance on licensing and other issues related to ensuring full support from both Microsoft and VMware.

Micro-segmentation - Day 1 brings together the knowledge and guidance for planning, designing, and implementing a modern security architecture for the software-defined data center based on micro-segmentation.

VMware NSX makes network micro-segmentation feasible for the first time. It enables granular firewalling and security policy enforcement for every workload in the data center, independent of the network topology and complexity. Micro-segmentation with NSX already helped over a thousand organizations improve the security posture of their software-defined data center by fundamentally changing the way they approach security architecture.

Micro-segmentation - Day 1 is your roadmap to simplify and enhance security within software-defined data centers running NSX. You will find insights and recommendations proven in the field for moving your organization from a perimeter-centric security posture to a micro-segmented architecture that provides enhanced security and visibility within your data center. Part of a series of specialized guides on System Center - this book provides focused drilldown into building a virtualized network solution.

Series editor Mitch Tulloch and a team of System Center experts provide concise technical guidance as they step you through key build, configuration, and implementation tasks. Dynamic organizations want to accelerate growth while reducing costs. To do so, they must speed the deployment of business applications and adapt quickly to any changes in priorities. Organizations today require an IT infrastructure to be easy, efficient, and versatile. It reduces costs by more efficiently managing information and resources while maintaining your ability to adapt to business change.

These features deliver extraordinary levels of performance and efficiency. Your IT team can build, deploy, secure, and maintain applications through a more agile framework. Cisco Intercloud Fabric capabilities help enable the creation of open and highly secure solutions for the hybrid cloud. These solutions accelerate your IT transformation while delivering dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and simplicity.

The VersaStack solution gives you the opportunity to take advantage of integrated infrastructure solutions that are targeted at enterprise applications, analytics, and cloud solutions. Authored by top VMware consultants, it brings together proven best practices, tips, and solutions for achieving outstanding performance and reliability in your production environment.

Offers techniques, tips, and insights into squeezing maximum performance out of a virtualized database. As technology advances, so must our education system. Cloud computing serves as an ideal method for e-learning thanks to its flexibility, affordability, and availability. Cloud-based learning is especially dynamic in STEM education, as it can significantly lower the cost of building cumbersome computer labs while fostering engaged learning and collaboration among students.

From virtual lab and app construction, to information sharing and course material distribution, this volume touches on a variety of topics related to the benefits and challenges of adopting cloud technologies in the classroom. This book is an invaluable reference for educators, technology professionals, administrators, and education students who wish to become leaders in their fields. Part of a series of specialized guides on System Center - this book focuses on using AppController to manage virtual machines and services across private and public clouds.

Series editor Mitch Tulloch and a team of System Center experts provide concise technical guidance as they step you through key configuration and management tasks. A full-color beginner's guide to the core concepts and skills of virtualization Virtualization is the IT world's hottest trend in recent years, and many colleges do not yet have curricula in place to prepare students for this important area.