Introduction

The recipes in this book are focused mainly on the management and configuration of virtual machines (runtime environments that mimic the operation of entire operating systems). In actual use and operation of a virtual machine, however, there are typically only a few processes running in the machine that are of importance to development and deployment. For example, the deployment of web applications often requires the deployment of a web server (and perhaps some middleware applications), but a virtual machine with a full operating system will also run several processes required to manage the entire operating system of the virtual machine itself. As such, large deployments of virtual machines to service software applications can become more inefficient as computational resources are used for virtual environment operating systems rather than the computational needs of web applications.

While these problems are an issue for hypervisor applications, there have been other attempts...