Introduction

A new trend in the IT industry has seen an increasing number of companies moving their data online, taking advantage of the more cost-effective cloud and its features. Cloud computing refers to the provisioning of resources without the need for capital expenditure, in which the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) provides all of the hardware and customer lease access. The CSP is also responsible for disaster recovery, so that the customer only pays for the resources that they use.

Virtualization has also become increasingly popular within companies due to the ability to recover a desktop or server in minutes. Prior to virtualization, if a server crashed, it could take the system administrator half a day to recover it. Virtualization is used to provide desktops for cloud computers.

In the CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1101) certification examination, Domain 4.0 Virtualization and Cloud Computing makes up 11% of the assessment and is broken down into the following exam objectives...