Have you ever wanted to give your manager a short book that would explain all the different ways that you can virtualize something in your enterprise? Now you can, thanks to virtualization guru Dan Kusnetzky. He has been around the virtualization industry longer than anyone I know and has a very engaging style. His O’Reilly eBook, Virtualization: A Manager’s Guide, is available for downloading now as an ebook.
Reading this book is a lot like sitting at Dan’s feet and seeing how his mind works to get around a very wide swatch of landscape, but in a way that is very approachable and digestible. When you stop to think about what can be virtualized these days, it is a big arena:
- Terminal or desktop access
- Applications, layered to a desktop without having to be installed
- Processors, for handling large compute-intensive jobs
- Security
- Networks
- Storage.
That is a lot to get your hands around. Each chapter covers a different type of virtualization and Dan names names of typical vendors, tells it like it is and suggests when it is and isn’t appropriate to use a particular set of virtual products.
He spends one of his chapters just discussing commonly misused terms and clarifying things such as clustering and server virtualization to make clear what is real, what is virtual and what is media hype or misnomer. He ends by saying:
Virtualization, however, is not a panacea. Using the wrong tool or using the right tool improperly can result in poor performance, higher costs for the organization, and the organization not being able to meet its objectives.
Virtualization is best used when the organization has an overarching plan and is de- veloping solutions to fit an architecture rather than focusing on the “hot” tool of the moment.
