In the previous section of the book, we tried to get ourselves familiar with virtualization, server consolidation, and cloud computing concepts. These concepts play a vital role in today's virtualized infrastructure of every organization, whether it's a small to medium size organization or a multinational enterprise. We also saw how server consolidation helps organizations to tailor their needs to consolidate their widespread server farm from underutilized to a consolidated few physical servers (hypervisors). Server consolidation also provides another way of allowing legacy applications to be run on the newer hardware and efficiently migrating the legacy server to run as a virtual machine (VM), which is called physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration.

Cloud computing is a journey, or can better be called a practice of managing IT in an organization. The major players for an organization to build their own private cloud, or start offering public cloud services, are people, processes, and technology. Server virtualization and consolidation is one element of cloud computing and provides the base platform for computing requirements in an economic way.

To understand more about cloud computing, we will go deeper into it and see the definitions for different types of clouds and their services, in this chapter.

In this first chapter, we will elaborate the Microsoft Hyper-V as a hypervisor and a server virtualization platform. After completing this chapter, we will understand the following concepts: