IT people - please recommend some resources for learning about Enterprise-grade virtualisation

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi all,

I’m interested in learning about Enterprise-class virtualisation - ideally VMware. I’ve started a new IT job recently, and while I’m not expected to be any sort of expert in VMware (my area of expertise is telephony), I’d like to be able to have an intelligent conversation with, and ask sensible questions of, the people who are, without embarrassing myself.

Where I’d like to get to is a broad understanding of the components which make up an Enterprise-strength virtual environment, how they interact, and what kind of high level things you need to think about when specifying VMs to support applications.

What I’m not expecting is to become a subject matter expert overnight, and I’ll have no need whatsoever to actually install, configure or administer VMware. I just want a high-level understanding of the architecture.

I’m not completely new to the concept of virtualisation - I happily run guest operating systems on my Mac using Parallels, and I’ve played with Virtualbox as well; but there’s clearly a gulf between that and the sort of industrial operation a big company would have.

I’m kind of hoping there’s a VMware for Dummies book out there, but failing that, any good resources are welcome. Most of what I’ve found on Google has assumed a certain degree of prior knowledge, or is very specific to a particular application version. I’m looking for an overview.

All thoughts welcome. :slight_smile:

2

Perhaps a silly question, but why don’t you ask your colleagues? And yes, there’s a Virtualisation for Dummies book.

3

Not really.

What the Big Enterprise money (and, to a lesser degree, the SMB money) gets you is layers of abstraction, and therefore, better high availability. Provided you have shared storage and a sane ARP policy.

In all honesty, the big enterprises that I’ve dealt with are slowly offshoring all of their workaday VMware shit to Bangalore and the Philippines, the same way they did with the rest of the sysops and netops stuff 5 years ago.