Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

Who Should Read This Book
What Is Covered in This Book
How to Contact the Author

Chapter 1: Understanding Virtualization

Describing Virtualization
Understanding the Importance of Virtualization
Understanding Virtualization Software Operation

Chapter 2: Understanding Hypervisors

Describing a Hypervisor
Understanding the Role of a Hypervisor
Comparing Today's Hypervisors

Chapter 3: Understanding Virtual Machines

Describing a Virtual Machine
Understanding How a Virtual Machine Works
Working with Virtual Machines

Chapter 4: Creating a Virtual Machine

Performing P2V Conversions
Loading Your Environment
Building a New Virtual Machine

Chapter 5: Installing Windows on a Virtual Machine

Loading Windows into a Virtual Machine
Understanding Configuration Options
Optimizing a New Virtual Machine

Chapter 6: Installing Linux on a Virtual Machine

Loading Linux into a Virtual Machine
Understanding Configuration Options
Optimizing a New Linux Virtual Machine

Chapter 7: Managing CPUs for a Virtual Machine

Understanding CPU Virtualization
Configuring VM CPU Options
Tuning Practices for VM CPUs

Chapter 8: Managing Memory for a Virtual Machine

Understanding Memory Virtualization
Configuring VM Memory Options
Tuning Practices for VM Memory

Chapter 9: Managing Storage for a Virtual Machine

Understanding Storage Virtualization
Configuring VM Storage Options
Tuning Practices for VM Storage

Chapter 10: Managing Networking for a Virtual Machine

Understanding Network Virtualization
Configuring VM Network Options
Tuning Practices for Virtual Networks

Chapter 11: Copying a Virtual Machine

Cloning a Virtual Machine
Working with Templates
Saving a Virtual Machine State

Chapter 12: Managing Additional Devices in Virtual Machines

Using Virtual Machine Tools
Understanding Virtual Devices
Configuring a CD/DVD Drive
Configuring a Floppy Disk Drive
Configuring a Sound Card
Configuring USB Devices
Configuring Graphic Displays
Configuring Other Devices

Chapter 13: Understanding Availability

Increasing Availability
Protecting a Virtual Machine
Protecting Multiple Virtual Machines
Protecting Data Centers

Chapter 14: Understanding Applications in a Virtual Machine

Examining Virtual Infrastructure Performance Capabilities
Deploying Applications in a Virtual Environment
Understanding Virtual Appliances and vApps
Open Stack and Containers

Appendix: Answers to Additional Exercises

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14

Glossary

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1: Understanding Virtualization

Figure 1.1 A basic virtual machine monitor (VMM)
Figure 1.2 Moore's Law: transistor count and processor speed
Figure 1.3 Server consolidation

Chapter 2: Understanding Hypervisors

Figure 2.1 Where the hypervisor resides
Figure 2.2 A virtual machine monitor
Figure 2.3 A Type 1 hypervisor
Figure 2.4 A guest failure
Figure 2.5 A Type 2 hypervisor
Figure 2.6 Abstracting hardware from the guests
Figure 2.7 Processing a guest I/O
Figure 2.8 The ESXi architecture
Figure 2.9 The Xen hypervisor architecture
Figure 2.10 Microsoft Hyper-V architecture

Chapter 3: Understanding Virtual Machines

Figure 3.1 A virtual machine
Figure 3.2 Windows Device Manager in a VM
Figure 3.3 CPU settings in a VM
Figure 3.4 Memory settings in a VM
Figure 3.5 A simple virtual network
Figure 3.6 Network resources in a VM
Figure 3.7 Virtual machine storage
Figure 3.8 Storage resources in a VM
Figure 3.9 A simplified data request
Figure 3.10 A simplified data request in a virtual environment
Figure 3.11 Cloning a VM
Figure 3.12 Creating a VM from a template
Figure 3.13 A snapshot disk chain

Chapter 4: Creating a Virtual Machine

Figure 4.1 Downloading VMware Workstation Player
Figure 4.2 The VMware Workstation Player package
Figure 4.3 The Player Setup window
Figure 4.4 The License Agreement window
Figure 4.5 The Custom Setup window
Figure 4.6 The User Experience Settings window
Figure 4.7 The Shortcuts window
Figure 4.8 The Ready to Install window
Figure 4.9 The installation progress screen
Figure 4.10 Installation complete
Figure 4.11 The VMware Workstation Player main window
Figure 4.12 Player preferences
Figure 4.13 Downloading VirtualBox
Figure 4.14 The VirtualBox installation package
Figure 4.15 The VirtualBox Setup window
Figure 4.16 The Custom Setup screen
Figure 4.17 Another Custom Setup window
Figure 4.18 The Network Interfaces warning
Figure 4.19 The Ready to Install window
Figure 4.20 Installation progress
Figure 4.21 The VirtualBox installation is completed.
Figure 4.22 The Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager
Figure 4.23 The New Virtual Machine Wizard
Figure 4.24 The Select a Guest Operating System screen
Figure 4.25 The Name the Virtual Machine screen
Figure 4.26 The Specify Disk Capacity screen
Figure 4.27 Customize the hardware.
Figure 4.28 Create the virtual machine.

Chapter 5: Installing Windows on a Virtual Machine

Figure 5.1 The Windows image
Figure 5.2 Select the VM.
Figure 5.3 Edit the virtual machine settings.
Figure 5.4 Using the ISO image to connect
Figure 5.5 Removable devices
Figure 5.6 Windows installation
Figure 5.7 Select Install Now.
Figure 5.8 The license terms
Figure 5.9 The installation type
Figure 5.10 Disk choice and options
Figure 5.11 Installation progress
Figure 5.12 The Express Settings screen
Figure 5.13 Connection choices
Figure 5.14 Create the username, password, and hint.
Figure 5.15 Network sharing
Figure 5.16 The completed Windows 10 installation
Figure 5.17 Install VMware Tools.
Figure 5.18 VMware Tools DVD drive options
Figure 5.19 The VMware Tools Welcome screen
Figure 5.20 Setup type
Figure 5.21 Ready to install
Figure 5.22 The installation is complete.
Figure 5.23 Restart the system.
Figure 5.24 A running Windows 10 VM
Figure 5.25 The About VMware Tools screen
Figure 5.26 Windows 10 devices
Figure 5.27 System properties
Figure 5.28 Disk sizes
Figure 5.29 Memory sizes
Figure 5.30 Adjusting the memory in a VM

Chapter 6: Installing Linux on a Virtual Machine

Figure 6.1 The VirtualBox main window
Figure 6.2 The VirtualBox Preferences screen
Figure 6.3 The Ubuntu Linux ISO image
Figure 6.4 The Create Virtual Machine Wizard
Figure 6.5 The Memory Size screen
Figure 6.6 Creating a hard disk
Figure 6.7 The Hard Disk File Type screen
Figure 6.8 Hard disk storage type
Figure 6.9 Hard disk location and size
Figure 6.10 The Ubuntu virtual machine
Figure 6.11 Choose Disk Image
Figure 6.12 Selecting the Ubuntu ISO image
Figure 6.13 The Ubuntu Welcome screen
Figure 6.14 Preparing to Install Ubuntu screen
Figure 6.15 Installation types
Figure 6.16 The Write the Changes to Disks screen
Figure 6.17 The Where Are You screen
Figure 6.18 The Who Are You screen
Figure 6.19 Rebooting the VM
Figure 6.20 The initial Ubuntu desktop
Figure 6.21 The Insert Guest Additions CD Image option
Figure 6.22 Automatically run the disk image.
Figure 6.23 The Authenticate screen
Figure 6.24 Installing the Guest Additions
Figure 6.25 Unmounting the disk image
Figure 6.26 The Ubuntu Displays utility
Figure 6.27 Processes in the System Monitor
Figure 6.28 Resources in the System Monitor
Figure 6.29 File Systems in the System Monitor

Chapter 7: Managing CPUs for a Virtual Machine

Figure 7.1 VMs using a host CPU
Figure 7.2 Processors in a virtual machine
Figure 7.3 CPU in the Task Manager
Figure 7.4 Physical and logical CPU information

Chapter 8: Managing Memory for a Virtual Machine

Figure 8.1 Memory in a virtual machine
Figure 8.2 Moving memory pages
Figure 8.3 Memory management in a virtual machine
Figure 8.4 Memory in virtual machines and their host
Figure 8.5 Ballooning memory
Figure 8.6 Memory overcommitment
Figure 8.7 Page sharing

Chapter 9: Managing Storage for a Virtual Machine

Figure 9.1 Virtual storage pathway
Figure 9.2 Virtual storage pathway in the Xen model
Figure 9.3 Pooled storage without a storage array
Figure 9.4 Virtual hard disk options
Figure 9.5 The Add Hardware Wizard
Figure 9.6 Select a disk type.
Figure 9.7 Select a disk.
Figure 9.8 Specify the disk capacity.
Figure 9.9 Specify the disk file.
Figure 9.10 A new hard disk
Figure 9.11 Initialize the new disk.
Figure 9.12 The New Simple Volume option
Figure 9.13 The new drive is ready.
Figure 9.14 Both hard drives
Figure 9.15 Deduplication
Figure 9.16 Thin provisioning
Figure 9.17 Storage I/O control

Chapter 10: Managing Networking for a Virtual Machine

Figure 10.1 A simple virtual network path
Figure 10.2 Networking in a VMware host
Figure 10.3 Multiple external switches
Figure 10.4 Networking in a Xen or Hyper-V host
Figure 10.5 A storage virtual switch
Figure 10.6 Determining an IP address
Figure 10.7 Network adapter properties in a VM
Figure 10.8 Virtual network adapter properties
Figure 10.9 Virtual machine network-adapter connection types
Figure 10.10 The Virtual Network Editor
Figure 10.11 A simple bridged network
Figure 10.12 Automatic bridging settings
Figure 10.13 Host-only network settings
Figure 10.14 A simple NAT configuration
Figure 10.15 NAT network configuration settings

Chapter 11: Copying a Virtual Machine

Figure 11.1 The VM Copy directory
Figure 11.2 A virtual machine's files
Figure 11.3 Editing the configuration file
Figure 11.4 Renamed virtual machine files
Figure 11.5 Moved or copied notice
Figure 11.6 Examining the network configuration
Figure 11.7 The Machine menu
Figure 11.8 The New Machine Name screen
Figure 11.9 The completed virtual machine clone
Figure 11.10 The virtual machine clone
Figure 11.11 Template creation choices
Figure 11.12 Manage a virtual machine.
Figure 11.13 The Clone Virtual Machine Wizard
Figure 11.14 The Clone Source screen
Figure 11.15 The Clone Type screen
Figure 11.16 Naming the clone
Figure 11.17 A first snapshot
Figure 11.18 A second snapshot
Figure 11.19 Physical files of a snapshot
Figure 11.20 The Workstation Pro Snapshot Manager
Figure 11.21 Changing the virtual machine
Figure 11.22 Physical files of a second snapshot
Figure 11.23 A second snapshot
Figure 11.24 Reverting to a previous snapshot
Figure 11.25 Deleting the second snapshot
Figure 11.26 Deleting the first snapshot

Chapter 12: Managing Additional Devices in Virtual Machines

Figure 12.1 The CD/DVD device configuration
Figure 12.2 Floppy disk configuration
Figure 12.3 Floppy disk management options
Figure 12.4 The floppy disk image file
Figure 12.5 Sound card options
Figure 12.6 USB management options
Figure 12.7 Connecting a USB device from a host
Figure 12.8 Display device options
Figure 12.9 The Serial Port Type screen
Figure 12.10 The Parallel Port Type screen
Figure 12.11 Generic SCSI device options

Chapter 13: Understanding Availability

Figure 13.1 NIC teaming
Figure 13.2 A virtual platform cluster
Figure 13.3 A fault-tolerant VM
Figure 13.4 VM migration during maintenance
Figure 13.5 Storage migration
Figure 13.6 Site Recovery Manager

Chapter 14: Understanding Applications in a Virtual Machine

Figure 14.1 Virtual machine resource settings
Figure 14.2 Resource pools
Figure 14.3 Three-tier architecture—physical
Figure 14.4 Three-tier architecture—virtual
Figure 14.5 Saving the jar file
Figure 14.6 Executing the benchmark test
Figure 14.7 The System Monitor
Figure 14.8 Benchmark effects
Figure 14.9 Examining the virtualization host
Figure 14.10 Performance Monitor on the host

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Introduction

We live in an exciting time. The information age is exploding around us, giving us access to dizzying amounts of data the instant it becomes available. Smart phones and tablets provide an untethered experience that offers streaming video, audio, and other media formats to just about any place on the planet. Even people who are not “computer literate” use Facebook to catch up with friends and family, use Google to research a new restaurant choice and print directions to get there, or Tweet their reactions once they have sampled the fare. The budding Internet-of-things will only catalyze this data eruption. The infrastructure supporting these services is also growing exponentially, and the technology that facilitates this rapid growth is virtualization.

On one hand, virtualization is nothing more than an increasingly efficient use of existing resources that delivers huge cost savings in a brief amount of time. On the other, virtualization also offers organizations new models of application deployment for greater uptime to meet user expectations, modular packages to provide new services in minutes instead of weeks, and advanced features that bring automatic load balancing, scalability without downtime, self-healing, self-service provisioning, and many other capabilities to support business-critical applications that improve on traditional architecture. Large companies have been using this technology for 10 to 15 years, while smaller and medium-sized businesses are just getting there now. Some of them might miss the movement altogether and jump directly to cloud computing, the next evolution of application deployment. Virtualization is the foundation for cloud computing as well.

This quantum change in our world echoes similar trends from our recent history as electrical power and telephony capabilities spread and then changed our day-to-day lives. During those periods, whole industries sprang up out of nothing, providing employment and opportunity to people who had the foresight and chutzpah to seize the moment. That same spirit and opportunity is available today as this area is still being defined and created right before our eyes. If not virtualization vendors, there are hardware partners who provide servers, networking vendors for connectivity, storage partners for data storage, and everyone provides services. Software vendors are designing and deploying new applications specifically for these new architectures. Third parties are creating tools to monitor and manage these applications and infrastructure areas. As cloud computing begins to become the de facto model for development, deployment, and maintaining application services, this area will expand even further.

The first generation of virtualization specialists acquired their knowledge out of necessity: They were server administrators who needed to understand the new infrastructure being deployed in their data centers. Along the way, they picked up some networking knowledge to manage the virtual networks, storage knowledge to connect to storage arrays, and application information to better interface with the application teams. Few people have experience in all of those areas. Whether you have some virtualization experience or none at all, this text will give you the foundation to understand what virtualization is, why it is a crucial portion of today's and tomorrow's information technology infrastructure, and the opportunity to explore and experience one of the most exciting and fastest growing topics in technology today.

Good reading and happy virtualizing!

Who Should Read This Book

This text is designed to provide the basics of virtualization technology to someone who has little or no prior knowledge of the subject. This book will be of interest to you if you are an IT student looking for information about virtualization or if you are an IT manager who needs a better understanding of virtualization fundamentals as part of your role. This book might also be of interest if you are an IT professional who specializes in a particular discipline (such as server administration, networking, or storage) and are looking for an introduction into virtualization or cloud computing as a way to advance inside your organization.

The expectation is that you have:

Some basic PC experience
An understanding of what an operating system is and does
Conceptual knowledge of computing resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network)
A high-level understanding of how programs use resources

This text would not be of interest if you are already a virtualization professional and you are looking for a guidebook or reference.

What You Need

The exercises and illustrations used in this text were created on a system with Windows 10 as the operating system. VMware Workstation Player version 12 is used as the virtualization platform. It is available as a free download from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/. It is recommended that you have at least 2 GB of memory, though more will be better. The installation requires 150 MB of disk storage. Also used is Oracle VirtualBox version 5. It is available as a free download from http://www.virtualbox.org. It is recommended that you have at least 2GB of memory. VirtualBox itself requires only about 30 MB of disk storage, but virtual machines will require more.

The examples demonstrate the creation and use of two virtual machines: one running Windows 10, the other running Ubuntu Linux. You will need the installation media for those as well. Each of the virtual machines requires about 30 GB of disk space.

What Is Covered in This Book

Here's a glance at what is in each chapter.

Chapter 1: Understanding Virtualization Introduces the basic concepts of computer virtualization beginning with mainframes and continues with the computing trends that have led to current technologies.
Chapter 2: Understanding Hypervisors Focuses on hypervisors, the software that provides the virtualization layer, and compares some of the current offerings in today's marketplace.
Chapter 3: Understanding Virtual Machines Describes what a virtual machine is composed of, explains how it interacts with the hypervisor that supports its existence, and provides an overview of managing virtual machine resources.
Chapter 4: Creating a Virtual Machine Begins with the topic of converting existing physical servers into virtual machines and provides a walkthrough of installing VMware Workstation Player and Oracle VirtualBox, the virtualization platforms used in this text, and a walkthrough of the creation of a virtual machine.
Chapter 5: Installing Windows on a Virtual Machine Provides a guide for loading Microsoft Windows in the created virtual machine and then describes configuration and tuning options.
Chapter 6: Installing Linux on a Virtual Machine Provides a guide for loading Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine and then walks through a number of configuration and optimization options.
Chapter 7: Managing CPUs for a Virtual Machine Discusses how CPU resources are virtualized and then describes various tuning options and optimizations. Included topics are hyper-threading and Intel versus AMD.
Chapter 8: Managing Memory for a Virtual Machine Covers how memory is managed in a virtual environment and the configuration options available. It concludes with a discussion of various memory optimization technologies that are available and how they work.
Chapter 9: Managing Storage for a Virtual Machine Examines how virtual machines access storage arrays and the different connection options they can utilize. Included are virtual machine storage options and storage optimization technologies such as deduplication.
Chapter 10: Managing Networking for a Virtual Machine Begins with a discussion of virtual networking and how virtual machines use virtual switches to communicate with each other and the outside world. It concludes with virtual network configuration options and optimization practices.
Chapter 11: Copying a Virtual Machine Discusses how virtual machines are backed up and provisioned through techniques such as cloning and using templates. It finishes with a powerful feature called snapshots that can preserve a virtual machine state.
Chapter 12: Managing Additional Devices in Virtual Machines Begins by discussing virtual machine tools, vendor-provided application packages that optimize a virtual machine's performance, and concludes with individual discussions of virtual support for other peripheral devices like CD/DVD drives and USB devices.
Chapter 13: Understanding Availability Positions the importance of availability in the virtual environment and then discusses various availability technologies that protect individual virtual machines, virtualization servers, and entire data centers from planned and unplanned downtime.
Chapter 14: Understanding Applications in a Virtual Machine Focuses on the methodology and practices for deploying applications in a virtual environment. Topics include application performance, using resource pools, and deploying virtual appliances.
Appendix: Answers to Additional Exercises Contains all of the answers to the additional exercises found at the end of every chapter.
Glossary Lists the most commonly used terms throughout the book.

How to Contact the Author

I welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you'd like to see from me in the future. You can reach me by writing to mportnoyvm@gmail.com.

Sybex strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check their website at www.wiley.com/go/virtualizationess2e, where we'll post additional content and updates that supplement this book if the need arises.

VIRTUALIZATION

ESSENTIALS