While the VMware book market is healthy (we liked “The Book of VMware: The Complete Guide to VMware Workstation” by Brian Ward a lot) and despite all of the excitement over virtualization (for example, see a couple of recent Backspin columns; “Virtualization will own the enterprise” and “Betting on virtualization”) there haven’t been any books so far that look at the bigger picture.
The bigger picture (combining OS virtualization with other enterprise virtualization strategies such as virtual file systems, virtual storage solutions, and clustering) is exactly what a new book from Apress covers. The book is Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise by Chris Wolf and Erick M. Halter.
This is a pretty ambitious work covering a broad swath of the underlying technologies and relating them to VM products including all of the flavors of VMWare, Virtual PC, and Microsoft Virtual Server the book provides a sound foundation for strategizing an approach to enterprise virtualization. The book’s focus is on commercial virtualization products so the open source implementations are unfortunately relegated to a single page discussion (on the other hand it could be argued that OSS products are nowhere near as ready for prime time as those from the commercial world so perhaps the omission isn’t as critical to enterprise implementations).
This is not just a theory book however — the authors get into things such as the nitty-gritty details of configuring all of the commercial products and even get into the minutiae of serious implementation issues such as how to install VMware’s DiskMount utility. Some of the topics are particularly useful to implementors such as preparing a virtual machine host, deploying and managing VMs on the desktop, deploying and managing production VMs on enterprise servers, backing up and recovering virtual machines, and implementing failover clusters.
Virtualization – From the Desktop to the Enterprise is a unique guide to the virtualization world. Highly recommended.
