Two months ago I blogged about an upcoming book! This book was written by John Arrasjid(VMware), Daniel Conde(VMware), Karthik Balachandran(VMware), Gary Lamb(INX) and Steve Kaplan(INX) and released during VMworld.
It was up for sale during VMworld and they did a great job cause they ranked 4th on the top selling books list at VMworld. John was so kind so send me a copy of the book and I managed to read it completely today. The fact that I read it completely today says something about the size of the book. Deploying the VMware Infrastucture holds 86 pages and is number 18 in the “Short Topics in System Administration” series by Usenix/SAGE.
This book isn’t like most VMware books out today. Most books are heavily technical and don’t talk about when to use which feature or product. This book is for those relativately new to virtualization and are in need of a guideline to write or come up with deployment strategies and use cases. Although I don’t consider myself a “newbie” I thought it was still useful to read cause it gives a nice clear overview in layman’s terms. I can imagine managers and architects also use this book to fresh up on their virtualization knowledge.
The structure of the book is good, starting out with an Intro on Virtualization and going from the benefits in terms of Capital Expense, ROI and TCO to Advanced Capabilities like HA and DRS. I can’t think of a single thing that’s left out that should have been in these 86 pages. So if you’re looking for a general guideline or writing a deployment plan than this book should be on your “must have” list.
You can find more info on the website of SAGE about the book and purchase it over there or here.