The promise of this book is to explain how your job as a vmWare administrator can be eased when using vCenter. The chapters have considerable details about many useful tasks you are likely to encounter. Like extending a logical volume in a linux operating system. The OS choices are Red Hat and CentOS; both very common. Unfortunately, ubuntu is not currently supported. Though who knows? By the time you read this, that may be true. Anyhow, this particular example demonstrates how easy it is to reboot the virtual machine and thence reconfigure to expand the volume. The steps given are quite explicitly detailed. Another tip is to install VMware Tools. Not strictly required, as the text admits. But it explicitly recommends that you can save yourself some time later by doing so. It delineates the main functions of the Tools. Like improving the graphics performance and that too of the mouse. Or for Microsoft Windows VMs, to improve the audio drivers. A later chapter talks about improving the uptime, or High Availability. It gives a quick run through of vCenter's ways to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. This acknowledges that in reality both types of downtime can occur. So how to minimise each and thus curtail the impact on users [like your boss?] is vital. The basic solution is to make a vSphere HA cluster, to create redundancy. Yes, this looks straightforward. The cost of course is that you need the raw hardware slack to make that cluster.