Virtualization: The Big Picture

Course Overview
Whether or not you've heard of it before, virtualization in use in just about every datacenter and the public cloud, but what is virtualization really, and how does it work, and how does it help make your life easier? Well, you should watch my new Pluralsight course to find out. My name is David Davis, and my latest course is Virtualization The Big Picture. I've been writing, teaching, and speaking about enterprise technologies and cloud computing now for over 10 years. During that time, I've created over 50 Pluralsight courses and this is one of the best courses yet. In my days as an IT administrator and manager virtualization saved my team and my company tons of time and money, and it can help you to do the same. Virtualization is a fundamental computing technology that you need to understand. In this course, you'll learn how virtualization works, how it can help you, the different types of virtualization, and the next steps you should take if you want to learn more. Specifically, we'll cover topics like why companies desperately need virtualization. How it's transformed datacenters, lowering costs, and improving efficiency. How a hypervisor makes server virtualization possible. How servers are virtualized, and how, with virtualization, availability, data protection, performance, disaster recovery, and business agility are all massively improved. Finally, you'll learn about how virtualization is used in the public cloud. By the end of this course, you'll truly understand what virtualization is, how it can help you, and most importantly, you'll feel comfortable with virtualization. You don't need to know anything to get started so, buckle up, grab a beverage, and join me on this short adventure into the world of virtualization.

Introduction
Virtualization is used in just about every datacenter and certainly in every cloud infrastructure in the world today. In this course, Virtualization, The Big Picture, you'll learn what virtualization is, how it works, how it can help you, and the next steps that you should take if you want to learn more about virtualization. Welcome to Virtualization, The Big Picture. My name is David Davis and I'll be your instructor. This is the introductory module for the course, and as such, it'll be a short module to tell you what this course is all about, and what you're getting yourself into by watching this course. Let's get started. It's very likely that you're affected by virtualization in some way already and you don't even think about it, you don't even know about it. That's because virtualization is working behind the scenes to carve up resources in some way, whether it's in a server infrastructure in the datacenter, whether it's across the cloud, or just locally on your own desktop where maybe you're running Windows on a Mac computer. In case you can't tell, I'm really excited about virtualization, and I hope it comes across throughout this course.

What Is Virtualization?
So far, you've learned that virtualization is powerful, it's awesome, it makes you more efficient, but what exactly is virtualization? How does it work under the covers, if you will? That's exactly the kind of questions you'll get answered in this module. Here's what you'll learn. We'll start off by defining virtualization. We'll start with the dictionary definition, and then I'll tell you my personal definition. From there, we'll discuss the many forms of virtualization. You'll be surprised. There's a lot more than just one type of virtualization. From there, I'll offer you the definition of a hypervisor, which you'll find out is very important when it comes to virtualization. You'll learn what is server virtualization, and what's a virtual machine, which is, I'll give you a hint, a very important part of server virtualization. I'll help you to understand virtual CPU, memory, storage, and networking, as well as the difference between type 1 and type 2 hypervisors. After that, I'll show you how to administer an enterprise virtual infrastructure, basically, how it works, and then we'll wrap it up with the difference between virtualization and the cloud. You'll find that the two have a lot more in common than you might think. So, with that, let's learn more about virtualization. Here we go.

Why Do You Need to Learn Virtualization?
At this point, you know what virtualization is, but why exactly do you need it? Sure, it might give you some flexibility in the datacenter, maybe give you the ability to run some applications on your laptop, but let's dig into that a little bit deeper. Here's what you'll learn in this module. We'll talk about first the IT challenge before virtualization. What's it like in the datacenter before companies implemented virtualization? So, we'll see the challenges that companies are facing. From there, we'll learn about the solutions and how virtualization lowers datacenter and administrative costs. How it improves availability, data protection, disaster recover, how it reduces energy consumption, and how it increases business agility. I also don't want you to think that virtualization is perfect. So we're going to talk about the complexities that are introduced when you implement virtualization. That way you'll see the pros as well as the cons, and then we'll wrap it by summarizing the benefits of virtualization. We've got a lot to cover, so let's get started.

Virtualization: What's Next?
In this course on Virtualization, The Big Picture, you learned what virtualization is and why you need virtualization. So, what's next? What are the next steps? That's what we'll cover in this short module, which is also the final module of the course. Here's what we'll learn. You'll learn about virtualization certificates that are available to you to prove your knowledge of virtualization. You'll learn about resources that are available to you around virtualization, free tools, free labs, things like that. And then finally, we'll talk about Pluralsight's Virtualization Fundamentals Learning Path. Let's get started.