Virtualization is a way to abstract applications and their underlying components away from the hardware supporting them and present a logical or virtual view of these resources. This logical view may be strikingly different from the physical view. The goal of virtualization is usually one of the following: higher levels of performance, scalability, reliability/availability, agility, or to create a unified security and management domain. Desktop virtualization is a software technology that separates the desktop environment and associated application software from the physical client device that is used to access it. Desktop virtualization can be used in conjunction with application virtualization and user profile management systems to provide a comprehensive desktop environment management system. VMware is the world leader in virtualization solutions. VMware offers products to virtualize the data center, and solutions that help you set up test environments. This book is about VMware Workstation Pro, the most versatile solution that can be used to set up a test environment to develop new software solutions, or to test complex architecture before taking it into production.