Every year, datacenter managers must deliver more services faster, with greater flexibility. They must efficiently handle soaring amounts of data, and unprecedented levels of complexity. And they must do all this with lower budgets and fewer resources. Datacenter virtualization with VMware's vSphere® 5 is the best way to achieve these goals and to accelerate your transition to cloud services. VMware vSphere® 5: Building a Virtual Datacenter brings together all the practical knowledge you need to evaluate, plan, implement, and manage vSphere 5 in your datacenter environment. Top datacenter virtualization consultants Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier begin by introducing vSphere 5 from the viewpoint of the datacenter manager and professional. They present essential definitions, advantages, and functions; review vSphere 5's architecture; and introduce core components such as vCenter Server and ESXi 5.0. Next, Maillé and Mennecier turn to implementation, presenting detailed examples, schemas, and best practices drawn from their extensive experience. They share practical insights into budgeting, scheduling, and planning; choosing the right architecture; and integrating vSphere with existing datacenter elements, including servers, storage, clusters, network infrastructure, and business continuity plans. They conclude with a start-to-finish case study: a datacenter virtualization project designed to support specific business objectives. Coverage includes: Assessing the potential benefits of datacenter virtualization in your environment; Organizing and managing a smooth migration to the virtualized datacenter; Anticipating specific challenges and risks associated with datacenter virtualization; Making tradeoffs to optimize stability, elasticity, scalability, and cost; Choosing the best installation/configuration options for your environment; Effectively linking vSphere 5 virtualization to existing datacenter elements; Driving more value from vSphere 5's powerful new datacenter features; Providing storage to efficiently support your hosted VMs, now and in the future; Managing limited memory and other server constraints; Leveraging new options for service continuity and high availability; Using backup architecture as a lever to reduce costs.