This book takes the industry beyond mere definitions of cloud computing and virtualization, grid and sustainability strategies, to casting them in day-to-day operations.

In Cloud Computing and Virtualization, the authors take the reader from beginning to end with the essential elements of cloud computing, its history, innovation, and demands. Through case studies and architectural models, they articulate service requirements, infrastructure, security, and outsourcing of salient computing resources. The adoption of virtualization in data centers creates the need for a new class of networks designed to support elasticity of resource allocation, increasing mobile workloads and the shift to production of virtual workloads, requiring maximum availability.

Building a network that spans both physical servers and virtual machines with consistent capabilities demands a new architectural approach to designing and building the IT infrastructure. Performance, elasticity, and logical addressing structures must be considered as well as the management of the physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Once deployed, a network that is virtualization-ready can offer many revolutionary services over a common shared infrastructure. With virtualization, comes elasticity where computer capacity can be scaled up or down on demand by adjusting the number of virtual machines actively executing on a given physical server. Additionally, virtual machines can be migrated while in service from one physical server to another. Extending this further, virtualization creates "location freedom" enabling virtual machines to become portable across an ever-increasing geographical distance.

Audience

Computer scientists in academia and industry working on cloud computing. No matter the level of interest or experience, the reader will find clear value in this in-depth, vendor-neutral study of cloud computing and virtualization.