Section 1.4. Summary

1.4. Summary

The virtual evolution of physical hardware and infrastructure has begun. It is an exciting time for IT. System administrators, architects, consultants and managers will all greatly benefit from the logical progression from the physical to the virtual. Portability, encapsulation and idealized virtual hardware make transitioning to the virtual critical. Service response, uptime, stability, testing, fault tolerance, disaster recovery are all positively impacted by moving to a virtual environment. For systems administrators this evolution is huge for meeting Service Level Agreements or simply better uptime and response. For management, virtualization will be an enormous cost-cutting tool while producing better results for services for which they are responsible.

Understanding some the concepts of a virtual world will allow you to better communicate and understand the enhancements that a virtual infrastructure offers.

We hope that readers of this book will become as excited about this, dare I say it, paradigm shift, as the writers. Because of the stability, flexibility, and power of VMware's ESX Server, virtualization of x86 servers will only proliferate and rightfully so. The technology is proven. One day the accepted model of putting a single OS running a single service will seem ridiculous. With VMware, that day is today.