Virtualization For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Managing Your Virtualized Environment

In This Chapter

• Seeing virtualization as a commodity

• Management: The new virtualization battleground

• Analyzing the two philosophies of virtualization management

• Deciding the right philosophy for you

Virtualization's move from niche to center leads to some very interesting developments, which I invite you to ponder. As virtualization moves to the center of your data center (if I may put it that way), one thing you'll need to strategize about is how you'll manage this new resident that has moved in. And you have lots of options; in fact, you might have too many options, because every virtualization product has several different ways you can manage both the product itself as well as the virtual machines it hosts. Of course, the right management option will depend on which of the many available virtualization products you ultimately choose.

Although VMware isn't the only solution, it has by far the largest market share today. With respect to how you'll manage those products, one important thing to keep in mind is that VMware comes in two flavors:

• As an application that sits on top of the native operating system: These VMware products (VMware Server and VMware Workstation, to be more precise) are added to an existing system that already has an operating system installed. You then install guest operating systems on top of the VMware virtualization software and interact with the guest operating systems as though they were native operating systems. ...