What this book covers

Chapter 1, Virtual Machine Concepts, covers the fundamental ideas of virtual machines as well as understanding the components that VMs are comprised of.

Chapter 2, Creating a Virtual Machine Using the Wizard, explains the step-by-step process of how to create a virtual machine using the wizard in the vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client.

Chapter 3, Other Ways to Provision a Virtual Machine, covers how to build a template and provision VMs from template, by cloning, or from physical machines using VMware vCenter Converter. Also, guest OS customizations are covered so that potential IP conflicts, hostname conflicts, and duplicate SIDs are avoided.

Chapter 4, Advanced Virtual Machine Settings, discusses a few advanced settings, how to make the configurations, and how these configurations will affect the virtual machine's functionality and performance.

Chapter 5, Managing Multitiered Applications with vApps, discovers why a vApp is the perfect container for a multitiered application. Also, included herein are instructions on how to create, configure, and manage VMware vSphere vApps.

Chapter 6, Virtual Machine Performance and Resource Allocation, explores different settings that may improve a virtual machine's performance, if needed. Also, discussed in the chapter are resource allocation settings that affect the amount of resources given to a virtual machine and how virtual machines compete in contention.

Chapter 7, Monitoring Virtual Machines, discusses how an administrator can monitor a virtual machine using esxtop and performance graphs.

Chapter 8, Migrating Virtual Machines, explains how to migrate a virtual machine using vMotion and Storage vMotion, if the need arises, as well as how to configure these features.

Chapter 9, Balancing Resource Utilization and Availability, gives a general understanding of how to configure and use vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage DRS, and High Availability.

Chapter 10, Virtual Machine Design, focuses on how the administrator should move forward in the creation and deployment of virtual machines taking everything discussed into consideration.