Compute and Server Virtualization

We'll start our compute infrastructure journey with a brief overview of data center- and application concepts.

After mastering the basics, let's focus on server virtualization. In this section we'll cover these topics:

• What caused compute virtualization, and how old is the idea?
• What are virtual machines?
• What are hypervisors and how do they virtualize hardware?
• What are containers and how are they different from virtual machines?
• What is Docker and how does it relate to containers?

In his May 2018 presentation, Chris Wahl provided a wonderful overview of server virtualization, hypervisor market, automated data center operations, and sizing of virtual workloads, ending with a few practical guidelines on working across enterprise silos.

Sometimes it's best to grasp new concepts through a series of examples. Matt Oswalt did a great job describing the basics of containers and Docker using a series of demos, from starting a simple container to creating a whole application stack with Docker Compose.

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Containers (including Docker and Kubernettes) are the new buzzword in application development world, so you must understand what their impact on data center infrastructure is. This section (presented by Stephen Foskett) should help you figure out:

• What are containers?
• Do they make sense?
• What can we do with them?
• What's the difference between containers and Docker?
• What are union and overlay file systems and why are they important.

If you've never heard about virtual networking or virtual switches start with this presentation I did at a Windows NT conference a long while ago. If you're at least vaguely familiar with the concepts, skip this one and continue with the introduction to virtual networking sections.

Virtual machines running within a hypervisor have to communicate with their clients through an outside network, and be able to access storage.

This section describes common mechanisms used to implement virtual networking and virtualized storage, including virtual disks, virtual switches, and multi-tenant isolation or security zones.

VLANs were commonly used to implement virtual networks, resulting in brittle environment using end-to-end bridging across whole data centers. Modern designs use MAC-over-IP encapsulations (overlay virtual networking). This section describes the basics of VLAN scaling and overlay virtual networking, you'll find more details in other network virtualization webinars.

You shouldn't use traditional hardware-based network appliances if you want to give the application developers the ability to deploy application stacks on demand. Modern cloud infrastructures therefore offer firewalling-as-a-service and loadbalancing-as-a-service.

These services are commonly implemented with virtual appliances and distributed in-kernel firewalls. Both technologies are described in this section.

VMware vSphere is the most common hypervisor you'll find in enterprise networks (surprisingly, it's also used by some Internet- and cloud service providers). I would therefore strongly recommend that you invest time into learning as much about vSphere networking as you can, and the vSphere 6 Networking Deep Dive is probably the best network-oriented resource you can get.

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By now you've mastered the virtual networking used to connect virtual machines to the outside world through hypervisor virtual switches.

I have bad news for you: containers are a totally different beast, and Dinesh Dutt did an excellent job covering their peculiarities in Docker Networking webinar.

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These Software Gone Wild podcasts focus on various Docker networking implementations.

These ipSpace.net webinars describe topics related to this module. Some of them have been included in the recommended or optional self-study materials; you might want to watch all of them.