How This Book Is Organized

This book has an introductory chapter and then three parts. Chapter 1 provides a very high level overview of the VSE which can be used to guide the reader toward the other parts of the book for more details. Parts 1 through 3 describe the various solutions available in the Virtual Server Environment in the areas of Partitioning, Utility Pricing and Management respectively. Each part of the book contains three types of chapters, including:

• An overview chapter The first chapter of each part, chapters 2, 8, and 13, cover each of the VSE solutions with a fair amount of detail. The primary focus in these chapters is to describe the key features of each solution and what can be done with them.

• Making the Most of Each part also contains a chapter that attempts to go beyond the many features of each solution to help you understand what you should really care about. These will provide sweet spot solutions and tips and tricks for the solutions described in that part of the book. These are chapters 3, 9, and 14.

• Product/Solution chapters Each product or solution has a dedicated chapter. In each of these chapters, the technology is introduced along with the primary terminology. Next, the architecture of the product is described which is followed by an example scenario. The scenario is used to walk the reader through the process of implementing the solution. These scenarios provide a thorough understanding of each technology without getting bogged down in the nuances and peculiarities of each product.

At the end of the book there are three appendices. Appendix A provides a detailed list of references that can be consulted for more information on each product or solution described in the book. Of primary importance are the user guides for each product which serve as a reference for each VSE technology. Appendix B lists the software and firmware versions used in the example scenarios in the Product/Solution chapters. Finally, Appendix C provides a list of each of the VSE products' command line interfaces, along with a reference to the manual page entries and the full path to each command.